


Single Use Weapon

by Fahye



Category: Kings (TV 2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Loyalty, M/M, Politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-15 08:25:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 67,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8049262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fahye/pseuds/Fahye
Summary: "The king is dead," says Samuels. "Long live the king."
A story about fealty and destiny, spies and secrets, and the things we do to hold onto power.





	1. abide in a secret place

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [electrumqueen](http://archiveofourown.org/users/electrumqueen/pseuds/electrumqueen) for her keen eyes! Even MORE thanks to this story's true hero, [the_grynne](http://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Grynne/pseuds/The_Grynne), who took my unwieldy creation and dug her fingers into all of its cracks, and forced me to think about it harder and to make it better in so many ways. All remaining faults of this story are entirely on my own shoulders.
> 
> And I should probably mention [Lizzen](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Lizzen), who made me watch this show in the first place.
> 
> This story goes AU from midway through episode 12 ("The New King, Part 1."). Chapter titles are from the book of 1 Samuel in the KJV Bible, all of them relating to the tale of David and Jonathan.

### JACK

There's no eye so unforgiving as that of a camera lens, unless it's that of King Silas himself. But Silas is dead. More dead than the video camera pointed at Jack right now, which has something of the living carrion-hunter about it, perched there on its tripod. A crow, perhaps. It's all greed and patience, and unblinking light reflected in dark depths.

"This'll be over soon," Jack says.

"It'll be over when you tell us what we want to know," the taller one says.

"I wasn't talking to you, dipshit," Jack says.

That gets him another hit across the mouth. Jack grunts as something soft inside his cheek tears, grinding against his teeth, and he spits a few more drops of blood into his lap. They haven't come right out and _said_ anything about it, no comments along the lines of making him less pretty or splitting open those cocksucker lips, but they don't really have to, the way tall-and-ugly is ignoring plenty of softer targets in favour of smashing his fist into Jack's face again and again.

Well. 'Ignoring' is all relative.

Jack's knees are stiff and aching, the pain in his shoulder has begun another upwards climb on the slow rollercoaster of agony that signals a very, very broken bone, and he's starting to wonder if he's going to die of blood poisoning before blood loss, given the state of the floor and the weeping burns on his feet. But if he had one hand free, right now, the first thing he'd do would be to wipe his chin, because the tickle of drying blood there is driving him fucking _nuts_.

"We know you're working with the Knights of Selah," says the shorter man. "Let's try this again. Tell us what they're planning."

He's younger, too, hovering behind the other guy's shoulder like he's not sure of the etiquette in a torture scenario. Where to stand. Which fork to use first. And boy, has he ever been using his forks: more into his tools than his fists, that one. Jack's been catching him staring with something like puzzled betrayal on his face, mixed in with the sneers.

The cult of celebrity. Figures.

"You don't know a fucking thing," Jack says.

Tall-and-ugly grabs hold of Jack's hair and forces his head back, and Jack can't help whining in his throat at what this does to his shoulder.

"Then fix that for us," he says, stolid.

The other guy says, "We'll get the truth from you eventually, traitor. You'll confess it, right into the camera."

"Fuck you," Jack whispers.

"Yeah, you'd like that, wouldn't you? We know about you. The whole kingdom knows what you are."

Jack flinches. Most of it's for show. He rolls his bloodied tongue around his mouth and lets it peek out through his lips.

"Come closer, then," he says. "Give us a kiss."

Tall-and-ugly releases Jack's head and, in the same moment, slams his boot against the worst of the burns on Jack's ankle. Jack lets out a scream, short and harsh.

When he's got control of his neck muscles back, Jack stares into the camera and breathes. Shallowly, because of his ribs.

"So, yeah, they're definitely going to show you this tape," he says. "I'm impressed, farm boy. You're learning a bit about how to be king, right? You send other people to do this kind of work for you, so you can sit up there behind the glass, keeping your hands clean."

Shit. Jack tenses his forearms but manages not to look down, to keep his drawling defiance aimed right into the lens. He's been working so hard to keep the focus on his face, keep them annoyed enough that they just want to shut him up; he really doesn't want them to get any ideas about his hands.

"No more fighting down here in the dirt for you, _Captain_ Shepherd, hero of the war—"

Oh, yeah, that does it. Tall-and-ugly holds himself like someone who's seen heavy action; he's been precise and professional, up to this point, but he won't take kindly to taunts about the war.

There's an audible crunch this time. Pain floods through Jack, coupled to a nausea so intense he almost vomits on the spot. He forces his eyes open, panting, unable to breathe through his nose without bubbling and choking. His head is spinning. There are bright lights and small darknesses in his vision.

"Wow," he says. His voice has gone thick and awful. "You're shit at this. Are you really all they could find to send? Are you the best interrogator the Gilboan army has to offer?"

The shorter one starts to say something, but tall-and-ugly stops him with a glance and then looks back at Jack. He's massaging his hand, though it's impossible to tell if any of the blood on his knuckles is his own, given how much of Jack's has already been contributed.

"No," he says. "I heard that was _you_."

Jack grins at him. Yet more blood spills over his lips, coppery and wet.

"Yeah," he says. "Look at you, you dragged that box into the room. Electroshock, right? And haven't called my attention to it, haven't even tried to open it. You just keep pounding away at me with your fists like that's suddenly going to start working, when you could have had those electrodes on my balls an hour ago. Why? Because you're too afraid I'd _enjoy_ it?"

"I'll make this simple." Tall-and-ugly reaches behind his back, elbow crooked in a way that tells Jack exactly what will be in his hand when it reappears. "Start talking, or we'll cut our losses."

When the gun barrel touches his forehead Jack inhales an icy surge of pure terror, controls himself, and exhales with what is probably an unwise amount of irritation.

"Now you're just embarrassing both of us," he says.

"Sir," says the shorter man. Jack really does need a better mental handle for him, but he can't decide between Terrible Buzzcut and Forks.

Tall-and-ugly's lip curls back over his teeth, and with good reason. If any of Jack's men had shown their hand like that during an interrogation, they'd have been banished from the room and raked over the coals afterwards. If Jack hadn't already known that David's soldiers have no intention of killing him, he sure as shit would now.

"You're right," says tall-and-ugly, in flimsy cover. "That'd be too easy."

He reaches out with the non-gun hand and puts it on Jack's shoulder, like they're friends, like he has something important to tell him.

Instead, he squeezes.

Jack screams so loudly he actually can't hear it, for a moment; the sound seems like something outside of himself; he's shrivelled, he's lightning, he's skin around pain and nothing else. When he manages to open his eyes and focus again, heaving breaths that narrowly escape being categorised as sobs, the man's stepped away—a surprise, Jack would swear he can still feel the iron grip of his hand, grinding bone against cracked bone—and the other guy is digging through his tray of goodies in search of something new to use on Jack. Right, then: Forks it is.

The camera's eye is still there, right in front of him. Impartial as ever. Jack can feel one of his own eyes starting to swell shut, but he manages to glare it down anyway.

"Don't you dare turn me off, David," he says. "The least you can do is fucking watch. If I can sit through this, then you can too."

The sudden _bang_ of the door being blown off its hinges is loud enough that Jack startles against his bonds— _fuck_ , shoulder—and it comes with a flash of light. Gunshots. Voices. Jack squints through smoke, sags back in the chair and watches tall-and-ugly go down with at least three bullets in him. People in black clothes and black masks over the top halves of their faces crowd into the room like a swarm of well-armed ants.

The semi-hidden face that ends up in front of Jack has blue eyes and a scar bisecting the upper lip, giving it a scornful flick. It's Chalmers, which means this is Alpha team.

"Benjamin," she says.

Her eyes sweep sharply over him, head to toe, before she takes her hand off her sidearm. Jack wouldn't have made it out of this place any more alive than tall-and-ugly, who's now lying as motionless as only meat can be, if there was any suspicion that his capture was a cover for something else. If he was passing information to the Gilboan army, instead of having it dragged out of him.

"I'll tell you what," Jack says, slurred with relief. "The last guy to save my life was a lot better looking than you are."

She snorts and draws her knife as she steps in to cut him loose. "You're not exactly a bunch of wildflowers yourself at the moment."

"By the way, if anyone asks," Jack mutters, when she's bent over him and working at the plastic ties, "you're with the Knights of Selah."

"Who's going to ask?" Chalmers slices the last tie and looks over her shoulder, where Forks is sitting still and wide-eyed against the wall with two guns trained on him. "Clean up the mess," she says.

"No, wait." Jack raises his voice. "My torturer, my rules."

"My team, my rules," Chalmers says, but she lifts two fingers to belay the kill.

Jack opens and closes his hands, braces himself with the one attached to his good arm, and levers himself into a standing position. For less than a second it's great, it's blissful, the novelty of not being seated, and then blood rushes back into his muscles, _cramps_ , and oh God his feet, the soles, burns burns burns—

Jack makes a hiccuping sound and then vomits bile all over his blood-stained trousers and the filthy floor. The act of retching makes his ribs clench and ache. He only remains standing because he's still gripping the chair.

"Sir," one of the men says, addressing Chalmers. He's holding out the tiny tape from the video camera, which was knocked off its perch during the attack.

Jack wipes his mouth and chin on the back of his forearm and starts to shrug, then thinks better of it when his broken shoulder sends fire in a wave across his upper body. "Your boss should watch it, if he wants to. He can see exactly what I told them."

"We could hear you screaming from two levels up," Chalmers says. "Doesn't sound like you'd gotten around to telling them much that they wanted to hear."

She pockets the tape anyway, of course. She's a professional.

"Hand me your knife," Jack says.

Chalmers eyes him. "Seriously, Benjamin, you're a gut wound away from the ICU, and I'm not even sure you're not hiding one of those. Sit down and wait for the medics."

Jack lifts his hand clear and stands on his own two feet. Takes one step towards Forks, then another.

" _Knife_ ," he says.

Chalmers sighs and pulls it from its leg sheath, and passes it over hilt-first. Jack bundles all the pain into a fuzzy red cloud and holds it at bay for long enough to walk between the two members of Alpha and crouch down in front of Forks. He holds the knife up, tilting it to and fro in the light. It's dark, probably ceramic. Keen-edged. The man's eyes follow it like a hypnotist's pendulum.

Jack does another showy one-handed turn, getting the blade into a better position, and then reaches down suddenly and slices off two of the man's fingers, clean at the knuckle, where his hand is resting on the concrete floor.

The knife is sharp enough, and Jack fast enough, that it takes Forks a few seconds to realise what's happened.

" _God_ ," he chokes, then, " _oh_ , augh, oh," and clutches the bleeding stumps to his chest. Firm pressure, that's it. He's not as dumb as he looks.

Jack holds out the bloodied knife, delicately, and someone takes it from him. He stares into Forks' eyes. Part of him is searching for that spark of bewildered anger, the death of whatever currency Prince Jonathan Benjamin of Gilboa might once have had to spend amongst the men of his own army.

"I know, it seems almost a pity, after you went to all that effort, but don't worry: we'll send the film on to your superiors once we're done with it. Unedited, I promise. And I want you to carry a message to _King_ David. Are you listening?"

He waits. Eventually Forks realises the question isn't rhetorical, shivers, and nods.

Jack smiles and colours his voice with sarcasm.

"Tell him I'm _so_ sorry about the mess, but it's time I made it clear which side I'm on. Tell him...he has no idea how far I'm willing to go."

  
  


### DAVID

"Wait," David says. "Are you—am I getting this right? Are you actually offering to have Jack assassinated?"

General Holland gives David a look that says, more or less: I can't believe you would come out and say something that crass. The first time David encountered this look, it made his face burn and his tongue stumble over itself, but it loses its power after the first fifty times or so.

David glances around the room. The other members of his security council fail, one by one and with varying degrees of embarrassment, to meet his eyes.

"No," says David. "I can't believe I have to say this, but no. That is Prince Jonathan of Gilboa you're talking about. He's my wife's brother, _and_ ," flatly, before anyone can make any pointed comments about the last queen's brother and how well that worked out, "he was once my comrade and my friend. I believe he still could be, one day.”

"Of course, sir. However—"

"I am tabling this topic," David says.

It's raining. David knows this only because he can hear the faint drumming sound of the water striking surfaces high above and below him, and because the light that streams through the window behind him has a cool quality to it, like sheets gone thin from too many washings. The king might stand high above the city, looking out, but he _sits_ with his back to the window. David's mouth is dry with talking, and the tall glass of water in front of him, poured from a steel jug more lovely than most of the vessels in his mother's kitchen, tastes ashy and sterile. He wants to stand on the street and tip back his head, open-mouthed to let the rain pour in.

"Carmichael?" David says. "You're making that face."

"Jack Benjamin's defection notwithstanding, sir," Raymond Carmichael says, "we cannot _table_ the Knights of Selah forever."

"I know," David says. He sighs and rubs his hands over his eyes. He takes a drink from his glass. As though this is a signal, everyone else in the room sits up and rustles their papers and looks more alert. "Premier Shaw has sent me a very polite letter which I'm pretty sure means we're still friends with Gath in all the important ways, but everything Premier Eliade says is so diplomatic I've got no damn clue what it means."

"Hannis Eliade is no fool," says Holland. "He knows he's on dangerous ground."

"We have the latest internal polls from Nebo," says Sameen Gross. "Page six of the briefing packet, Your Majesty."

David flicks to it obediently.

"Eliade's popularity has climbed two points," Carmichael says, with irritating kindness, just as David finds the poll results himself. "He's holding on to power. But members of his own party have been seen meeting openly with General Russe."

There's a pause. The rain drums more loudly on the distant roof. If David stares hard at the reflective surface of the table in front of him, he can see flickers of movement that might be large raindrops gathering momentum and swallowing smaller ones in their plunge down the window.

"Well, if nobody else is going to do it, I'm going to ask the question. Are we worried about a coup being imminent?” says David.

"Are _we_ worried," asks his Minister for Defence, with a small smile, "or is Eliade worried?"

"Enough sophistry, Celia," says Carmichael.

Celia Halphen gives a prim cough, sets down her blue pen and picks up a black one. This is the equivalent of glaring daggers, for her; David digs the heel of one shoe into the top of another and resists the urge to roll his eyes.

"If Russe takes power, Nebo becomes instantly hostile to a significant portion of its own people, and it's only a matter of time before we end up deciding whether we can handle a flood of Potnyan refugees," Gross points out. "We're their only land border."

"I don't know about _hostile_ ," begins Holland, and Gross raises one of her neat eyebrows.

" _If Eliade spends any more time kissing their lazy feet, he'll end up with plague blisters on his tongue_ ," she says. "Calling them rats, and not even in private. Russe said that to a reporter's face."

"Not to mention that Eliade is an ally, and Russe is a potential threat to that ally," David says firmly. "That's still our position."

The meeting moves on to domestic matters. David's tired and his neck is tight by the time it finishes. Security briefings always give him a feeling like someone's tied threads to his shoulder blades and is twisting the ends together around their fist.

That feeling only starts to ease when he's in his private study, looking at Michelle's yellow-lit face on the screen of his laptop. She's upgraded the microphone and her voice comes through beautifully, and David can no longer tell if the swishing hum of rain is on her side as well or his alone.

"Is it raining where you are?" he asks.

"It was earlier," she says. "It's cleared up now." There's a gentle amusement in her voice that says they can talk about the weather for as long as he needs. That's enough to needle David; he slumps a bit further in his seat and tells her about the security meeting, and about General Holland's oblique offer.

"You know, I guess I should be glad he ran it past me at all. I really think if I hadn't been an army guy myself, he might have gone and done it anyway, and expected me to be grateful afterwards."

Michelle gives him a look that every single one of the Benjamins has given him at some point. It's not unkind, but it still makes him feel like he just walked in off the farm with mud and pigshit coating his boots.

"Maybe not," she says. "He might have just wanted to see what you'd say."

"They all think I'm hopelessly naïve, to believe in Jack's better nature."

Michelle gives a sad, tense smile, and sweeps her hair back out of her face. Something about the gesture is exhausted, and David aches to pull her into his arms, to smell the vague cloud of scent from her hair conditioner that always fills the air when she moves her hair around in that way.

"You're a good man, David. The best sort of man, to be able to think well of Jack even after...whatever happened between you two. And whatever he's doing now."

"I don't believe he's working against me," David says honestly.

Michelle sighs. "I don't know what to believe," she says. "Every time I feel like I have a handle on my brother, I lose it again. He got you onto the throne, we both know that, but his whole _life_ he's wanted to be king. I can't forget that he wanted it badly enough that he turned on our father. I just—I don't know, David. He's disappointed me too many times. I can't be impartial. But that's why you have advisors. At least listen to them."

David nods. "Thanks. I'll consider that."

" _David_ ," Michelle says.

"Shit. I'm sorry." David drops his head into his hands and peeks a smile through. "It's getting automatic. Are you proud, or disappointed?"

_I'll consider_ _that_ is one of the phrases emerging often from David's mouth these days. It doesn't mean yes, it doesn't mean no. It doesn't mean _I agree_ or _I disagree_. It's conciliation, diplomacy; just one of the bundle of skills that Silas so helpfully forced David to develop by using him as a mouthpiece, dragging him around two countries, and putting him on trial.

Michelle starts to reply, then looks quickly over her shoulder in response to a noise that David can't hear.

"She's up," Michelle says. "Do you want to see her?"

"Of course I do," David says.

Michelle stands and disappears from the frame of the camera, then reappears with a wriggling bundle in her arms. She shrugs one sleeve of her shirt down, baring her breast. David shifts forward on the leather of his seat as though being closer to the computer will bring him closer to his daughter.

"Hi, Simone," he says. "Hey there."

"Hi, Dad," says Michelle softly.

"She's definitely bigger," David says. He folds his arms on the desk and gazes at the smudge of black hair on Simone's head, the way her tiny face is both stern and blissful as she turns to feed. The royal family of Gilboa exists in a cosy technological silence for a while.

After a few minutes, Michelle looks up and smiles at David again. "By the way, I'm sending Lucinda back to you. She should be in Shiloh tomorrow."

"Are you sure you can do without her?"

Michelle makes a face. "All she's doing here is providing a convenient punching bag for my mother. And she won't punch back."

"Punch back against Rose?" David smiles. "I don't know many who would."

Michelle starts to open her mouth. She closes it again, too late to stop the name from slipping silently into the space between them, and glances away. David nods, rueful, and makes a decision.

"Michelle, when you get back to the city, we have to talk about Jack. Properly."

Michelle looks back at him. Now the sadness around her mouth is skirting the edge of an old anger, well-worn, all the colour gone out of it. David swallows a sickly mouthful of guilt.

"I thought there might be something to talk about," she says.

"You didn't ask," David says, surprised.

"You didn't tell," says Michelle. "David, this _life_ is secrets. I guess I just trust that you're keeping the right ones."

"Remind me why you aren't here blinding my cabinet with your brilliance?" David asks. "Come on, let's swap. I can feed Simone. I can be a punching bag."

Michelle smiles. "I'll be back soon. And you're doing well, you know you are, you're just beating yourself up for not being perfect at it. You have to make sure you're celebrating the little victories."

She's right. All things told it's a miracle that things aren't _more_ unstable, that the centre is holding.

"Yes, but your father was right about a lot of things, and innovation was one of them. I don't just want to be keeping my head above water, I want to progress. It's not enough to have done a good thing. We have to keep on doing more."

"I know," Michelle says. She yawns, sudden and wide. One of her fingers strokes across Simone's cheek and David feels a phantom flicker on his own fingertip, like a butterfly's wing. "It's a long race, David. It's the rest of your life. It's all right to pace yourself."

"I love you," David says. "Both of you."

"We love you too," Michelle says. She kisses her fingers and they loom suddenly huge and pink in David's vision as she touches them to the camera.

When the screen is black, David is restless, not ready for sleep but not wanting conversation with anyone likely to provide it here. He could go and make himself a sandwich, some cocoa; he's picked up the Benjamin habit of haunting the kitchen at odd hours. He knows why they did it, now. It's the only room in the palace that doesn't feel like a palace.

David closes the laptop and wanders over to the study window as lightning blinks in the distance. He counts the seconds; there are almost seven before the thunder comes, and it's quiet, just a half-hearted rumble. The storm's a fair way off yet.

He's still thinking about Jack. In particular, about the possibility that Holland might have ordered Jack's execution of his own accord, or that the orders to the small unit in Nebo might have been corrupted despite Carmichael's careful channels of intelligence. He imagines someone bringing him word—bringing him _proof_ , photographs of Jack lying dead somewhere—

The rain-streaked window is cool. David rolls his forehead against it, side to side, swallowing down panic. Useless. He's king of Gilboa and his power is second to none. His brothers won't visit, his wife is a face on a screen, he won't be able to hold his daughter for weeks yet, and Jack is. Jack is.

"Sir."

David freezes.

"Thomasina. I thought we agreed you would at least pretend to knock, after nine at night."

"I'm sorry, sir," she says. Her face, when David turns around, is not sorry. It's not anything. "I have something for you," she says. "Raymond Carmichael seemed certain you would want to be disturbed."

The envelope is yellow and sealed. David can feel the hard rectangular object inside; too large for a flash drive, too small for a phone. Just the right size to be a tape from a portable camera.

"There was a message as well," Thomasina says. "Verbal. The messenger in question will be available for an audience tomorrow."

"Where is he now?"

"St Joseph's."

"The hospital," David says. Dread writhes for a moment in his stomach.

"Yes," says Thomasina. She taps one neatly trimmed fingernail against the envelope. "However, I'm told he also wrote the message down. It's included."

"Thank you," David says. "Is there anything else?"

" _Is_ there anything else, sir?"

"No. Good night, Thomasina."

She has way of announcing her exits and not her entrances; David hears the click as she closes the door behind her. Another far-off flirt of a lightning bolt illuminates the edges of shadows in the empty study. David turns the envelope in his hands. His heart is punching his sternum with unsteady knuckles.

"Fuck you for doing this to me, Jack," he whispers. The words burn on his lips, cleansing, like spirits. " _Fuck_ your plans."

He tears the envelope open.


	2. not with sword and spear

### JACK

The life and the reign of King Silas Benjamin, first sovereign of the united Gilboa, come to a halt in the same moment. Later Jack tells himself that he should have seen it coming.

He doesn't. He's standing behind his father's right shoulder hating himself more intensely than he ever has before, because this is his moment, this is it, this is his _chance_ , and his feet might as well be glued to the floor. It was simple, playing out in his mind last night and this morning and in the breath he took before walking out onto the dais. Seize the moment. Step forward. Speak clearly to the people and present yourself as the solution, as the change they so desperately want. Jack's sold the idea of a hero as treasonous, sold gloss and spin and all the other euphemisms, and it turns out he can't find the words or the guts to sell himself as the only thing he's ever wanted to be.

He can see William's face clearly. If he could see the man's knuckles, he expects they'd be white, wrapped around the railing.

 _Coward_ , he tells himself, _coward, coward,_ in his father's voice, in Joseph's voice, in his own.

Still, nothing.

The breathtaking, horrible, consuming relief of inaction has barely begun to sweep over Jack when he sees the man in the throng of journalists drop his camera and draw the gun.

Instinct seizes hold of Jack by the nervous system and propels him forward. Disarm, disarm, get the fucking gun—not enough time—all right, _shove_ , hard, his shoulder against his father's. He isn't fast enough to get fully out of the line of fire, and his upper arm flares with sudden heat. It's not the first or the worst time Jack's been shot, but it's enough to throw off his balance and send him stumbling to the side.

There are four more shots. Jack hears each one distinctly.

He hears the heavy thuds as his father falls, first to his knees and then entirely to the floor.

Jack finds his feet. As soon as the shooter turns away, gun aimed at the rest of the crowd, Jack runs forward and launches himself at him from the back, making sure that when they hit the ground his fist lands on the man's fingers. But, _damn_ it, the shooter manages to keep hold of the gun, and he's no pudgy photographer; there's real muscle bulk under that coat, and real training. Jack's right arm is weak. He can't feel pain there yet, he's too busy for that, but it's weak. The man beneath him bucks hard, trying to throw Jack off, and Jack keeps his arms locked and grabs the man's wrists and lets them roll, untidy, elbows and knees knocking and trying for advantage. The gun goes off in the process, _that's six_ , and again, _seven_ , and Jack's working so hard to keep it pointed away from himself that he has no idea where the bullets end up.

"Sir!" someone's yelling, "Major Benjamin!"

He's got the man sort of pinned, now, all four of their hands in the space between their torsos and still struggling, the barrel of the gun wobbling like a flag in a breeze. It's a standard single-chambered MX .40; there should be one round left.

The man's grimacing with effort, teeth bared, panting, kicking at Jack for all he's worth. Jack gets his arms into position and lets gravity drop him, suddenly, the points of his elbows falling right onto the man's solar plexus. The man gasps, his arms slacken for a moment, and it's enough. Jack forces the gun around, shoves the barrel of it up under the man's ribs, locks their fingers around the trigger and squeezes.

The force of the shot jolts through the both of them, and then the man beneath Jack goes limp.

Jack disentangles his fingers. There is some blood on them. Not a lot. He wipes them on the man's pants, and stands up.

The room is suddenly quieter. How much time has gone by? Seconds. Not even half a minute. People in beautiful clothes are craning to look, some hovering just above their seats, some pushing for the exits, some staring at whatever is happening on the dais with their hands pressed over their mouths. Behind Jack, someone is crying in thin, heaving sobs.

Something more visceral than thought and more violent than the action of pulling a trigger surges up into Jack's mouth, flooding the empty part of him that's been acting on little more than training. It chokes him, and then it gives itself voice.

Jack looks up at the balcony and yells, " _No_."

William stares down at Jack; Jack stares back. His uncle doesn't look angry. Well, Jack is angry enough for the both of them. He is so angry he could shake apart.

" _You didn't tell me this was how it would happen_."

"I—I didn't think you would ever go through with it," William says. His voice is odd, throbbing; he sounds almost frightened. "I never thought you could—Jack, how could you? Your own _father_."

Jack's mind is a basin of water in which bloodied hands are being washed: fogged with red. He can't think.

"What?" he says.

"Oh, dear," William says. "Was that your plan? Play the hero just that little bit too late, kill the man you hired, and then try to shift the blame? It won't work, Jack. I won't cover for you. Guards! Seize the prince! He—"

The shot rings out and Jack flinches even as he thinks: but the gun's empty.

William slumps, with a hole in his forehead. He was leaning far enough forward in his theatrical display, pointing at Jack, that even with the force of the bullet his body simply folds in half over the railing and dangles there. The back of his head is an ugly mess.

That's not an easy shot. From beneath the bright lights of the dais to a shadowed balcony, medium range, with a handgun.

Jack had no idea his mother could shoot like that.

At the same time, he's not even the smallest bit surprised. He stares at her, and she looks back at him as she lowers the gun. Her face is ravaged with tear-tracks and there's blood smeared all over her dress, like she's been leaning over—like she's been trying to—

"That's three times now I've saved your life, my son," she says. She transfers her gaze to Michelle, who's standing a bare few feet from where Jack has ended up. The queen's mouth is wavering but her gaze is fearless. "I would have done it three hundred times."

"I understand," Michelle says.

On the balcony, Andrew has no blood on him that Jack can see. He's staring down at his father's body with no more than mild surprise on his face, the useless, sociopathic _fuck_.

"Thomasina," Jack says.

Thomasina follows his gaze and gestures to some guards, who make rapidly for the exit with their eyes on the balcony as well.

"Yes, sir," she says, but her voice falters on the second word and Jack hurtles back into full awareness.

He grabs Michelle's arm, near the elbow and probably too hard; his fingers sink into her flesh. The crowd's panic burst its gates as soon as their mother pulled the trigger. There are raised voices, screams echoing in the room, along with the endless and urgent flash of cameras. Jack's chest is tight and air rasps in his throat. _Nerve gas drills,_ he thinks, and has to fight down the near overwhelming urge to reach for a mask that isn't there.

"Thomasina," he says. "We need out, can you get us—" and Thomasina says at once, "Follow me."

" _Dad_ ," Michelle cries, trying to wrench herself away from Jack's grasp and towards the centre of the dais.

Jack doesn't look. He—he is not going to look. Looking at Michelle's face is enough.

"Come on," he says.

" _Princess_ ," Thomasina says, tight and almost savage.

That works. Michelle becomes, if not cooperative, at least a weight to be dragged along, rather than actively fighting to remain behind. Two guards close in on either side of her, and Jack forces himself to release his sister's arm as another two set their shoulders to his and hustle him out of the room.

They lose Thomasina, somewhere along the way, but the guards clearly have their orders, because they escort the Benjamin twins firmly to a room and tell them that they won't be going anywhere for a while. Jack nods and shuts the door on them. He knows how this goes: the palace needs to be secured, the last thing anyone needs is members of the royal family running willy-nilly through the corridors.

The room is one of those used for brief ceremonies and formal meetings with diplomats and visitors. It has a heavy tapestry on one wall, a painting that Jack recognises as the triumphal arch in the city of Calvary on another, and no windows. Jack fumbles at the buttons of his uniform jacket, suddenly stifled.

Michelle, hugging her elbows, paces the exact width of a rug and back again. Jack shrugs his jacket off, hooks a chair out from the table with his foot and sits down.

"Jack, your arm," Michelle says.

Jack looks at the blood soaking his shirt from shoulder to elbow. The sight of it flicks a switch in his spine, and the pain makes itself known all at once.

"It's fine," he says.

Thomasina, always so timely it borders on the miraculous, lets herself into the room. She has gauze and a bandage in one hand, still in standard military plastic packaging, and she hands them to Michelle.

"For now," she says, nodding at Jack's arm.

"It's _fine_ ," Jack says.

"I'll get a doctor here soon. Things are—complicated, the doctors are—"

"Thomasina," Michelle says. "Our father?"

Thomasina stands very still. Jack has always been impressed with how like a statue she can be when she wants to, like some expensive and exquisitely carved stone, giving you nothing and reacting to nothing. This is not like that. This is the stillness of someone who has reached the end of a tunnel and found a locked door, and who knows they do not have the energy to turn around and walk back out.

"The king is dead," she says.

Jack's known since he saw his mother's face. But hearing it spoken aloud is starkly absurd.

"No," Michelle says.

"I am—sorry," Thomasina says.

Jack wants to laugh in her face. He also wants to apologise right back at her, which is even more absurd, except for the fact that she's probably the person in this room with the least reason to be glad that Silas is dead. What's blood worth, in the end? Less than nothing, to the king. Less than the ground beneath his fucking feet.

Jack closes his eyes against bitter nausea.

"And our mother," Michelle says. "Where is she, why isn't she here?"

"The queen," Thomasina says, "has surrendered herself to police custody."

"What?" says Jack.

"In order to show due process. Order being restored in a day of chaos. She killed a man, in full public view."

"So did I," Jack says.

Michelle flinches.

"You used necessary force to subdue an armed assassin who had just gunned down the king," Thomasina says, unwavering. "You are still a member of this country's military, are you not, Major Benjamin?"

Jack presses his heels into the ground and stares at his clasped hands, unable to answer.

"Exactly," Thomasina says. "The queen shot an unarmed man."

Thomasina inclines her head to a point exactly in between the two of them, and leaves the room. The door clicks behind her and Jack waits for the second click, the one that would signify them being locked in. It doesn't come.

He only realises that Michelle's standing in front of him when her palm snaps his head to the side. The slap stings more than the bullet had.

"Unarmed or not, William was _guilty,_ " Michelle says. "And he—our _father_ , how could you, Jack? What were you _thinking_?"

"I didn't _know_ ," Jack snarls. "That's not—that wasn't the plan. But thanks, thanks a lot, your faith in me is really fucking inspiring, sis."

Michelle kneels down in front of him. Her face is hard.

After a moment, there's a crinkle of plastic, and she starts to wrap the bandage firmly around the gauze, pressed to the wound on Jack's arm. She doesn't speak until she's tucking the end of the crepe beneath a layer of itself.

"Promise me," she says then. "Promise me you didn't conspire to have our father killed."

Jack can feel his lip curl. It doesn't help. Heat is brimming in his eyes.

"Deposed," he says, dropping the word like a grenade. "Set aside. That's all. Someone had to—and it was my _time_ , Michelle, he was never going to—not after what—"

Now he's dizzy with the past tense, with hatred and sorrow meeting within him and turning to steam that smells of shoe leather and tastes like wax-polished wood on his lips.

"Not after what you did for David," Michelle finishes.

Jack's whole body jerks. For the first time in months, he actually managed to forget the entire fucking existence of David Shepherd.

"The execution," he says.

Michelle's eyes go wide and glassy with a fresh crop of tears. "That's. Oh, God, Jack, it must be— _he_ must be—"

"No, I—"

There's a pounding on the door, voices raised heatedly outside. Michelle climbs to her feet, awkward in her dress and heels. Jack looks around them for a weapon and has half-decided on a heavy bronze figurine before he thinks to wonder what possible threat there could be to them now. William is dead. William's hired assassin is dead. No other member of William's vague conspiracy, if they exist, would be so stupid as to show their hand at this point.

Maybe it's the people, Jack thinks, swallowing down hysteria. There were more than enough cameras pointed at him when he yelled idiotically up at his uncle; no doubt the entire kingdom has seen the proof of his involvement, by now, from any number of different angles.

The voices fall to a mutter, then a silence. And then the door opens and Holloway steps through.

"Sir," Holloway says.

Jack stands and returns the salute automatically. His arm screams at him. "Lieutenant."

Holloway looks shaken. "Sorry to intrude, sir. Under the, ah, altered circumstances, I thought you'd want the package delivered to you personally."

"What package," Michelle starts, and then there's a renewed bout of argument outside and someone else shoves their way through the half-open door.

"No, I'm not going to wait, I—"

" _David_ ," Michelle gasps.

"Michelle?" David starts towards her, then stops. One of the guards is frowning into the room; Jack waves the all clear.

"Thanks, Sean," he says. "Good work."

Holloway nods and turns to leave. "Of course, sir."

"God, David." Michelle launches herself at him, body to body. David wraps his arms around her at once, but he looks at Holloway through the closing door, and then right at Jack over Michelle's shoulder.

"It was you," David says. "You saved my life. Why?"

Jack could say: because you've saved mine twice. Because words don't settle debt.

But his throat still aches, and he says, "Nobody was supposed to die."

"It's true, then," David says. "He's dead."

"Yes," Jack says. He feels punched out, numb. He thinks again of Andrew Cross, gazing unblinking down at William's corpse.

Michelle pulls out of David's arms but her shoulders collapse inwards at once, and she gives a few rawly heaving sobs.

"Hey, hey, Michelle." David takes her hand and kisses her forehead. He tugs Michelle over to a couch, where he sits beside her.

In the space of those steps she's already quietened, pulled herself together, and now she brushes tears angrily from beneath her eyes.

"Now what?" David says. "What happens now?"

There's a smudged X in white chalk right over David's heart, tangible evidence that the Benjamins aren't the only ones who have been within dancing distance of death today. And of course he'd be the one to ask the question that Jack's been ruthlessly not asking himself, because he already knows the road down which the answer lies.

"The thing is," Jack says, "there's no precedent."

"But...Gilboa is a blood monarchy," David says.

"No, it isn't." Jack walks over to the tapestry on the wall, and touches it with his fingertips. The artificial light catches on threads of gold and silver within it. "Everyone knows it's supposed to be one. But my father, in his _infinite_ wisdom, insisted that it was left out of the constitution, when they wrote it. A gesture of humility, he said. An amendment to be added later. He would not impose his bloodline on the people until he had proved his worth." A grimace catches itself on his lips. "Proved our worth."

"He always meant it to be you, Jack," Michelle says.

"But he never formally announced," Jack snaps. "It was always—some fucking carrot, to be dangled over my head. I hadn't earned it to his satisfaction. And then I made him look a fool and a liar in front of his own cabinet. He didn't want me as his heir. He was never going to want me. I _told_ you."

"So the problem is that there's room for debate," David says. "Is that what you're saying?"

"The succession is fragile," Jack says. "I was—William was—look, there was momentum on my side, and now it's gone."

It is suddenly unbearable for him to be standing still while he finally allows this reality to crash its way through him and emerge from his mouth. He knocks the side of his fist against the tapestry, paces the length of the wall and comes up against another. If there were a window there, he would break it.

"If I try to claim the throne now, without the support of constitutional law, the resistance will be enormous. There was a coup, an _assassination_ ," he snarls, "and I was implicated. At _best_ we get domestic unrest and uneasy authority. At worst, civil war."

He runs his fingers roughly through his hair, once, then turns around around and gazes at them, David and Michelle sitting side by side on a couch, hands clasped. They look like a painting, they look—

God's truth, God's reckoning, takes hold of Jack by the innards. By the heart, by the lungs, by all of his soft and bloody parts. He can hear music and gunfire and the roar of crowds.

Please no please no. Please.

It's agony, it _hurts_ , God's touch. He can't believe he ever thought it wouldn't.

"It has to be you," he says.

"What?" says Michelle.

"No," Jack says. "You."

David actually makes an aborted turn of his head, as though there are any _other_ noble, grace-given, beloved-by-the-people fucking war heroes in the room that Jack might be speaking to.

"Jack, what the hell are you talking about?" he asks.

Jack swallows hard. Sorry, Mom; you're really going to hate this.

"You two are going to get married. Fast. Now, if we can swing it. You're going to be a perfect unit of royal leadership, all right? The princess of the blood and Gilboa's saviour, God's chosen king. That has to be the story, and we have to construct it now, _deliver_ it now. There can't be any room for doubt."

There's a flash of naked emotion on Michelle's face, and she releases David's hand to curl her own together in her lap, restless. It's an old tell, but Jack doesn't have time to find out what she's hiding. Bury one secret, bury ten, it doesn't matter as long as they can hold onto the power to do it.

"You know I'm right," he tells her. "Congratulations. You win. You're engaged. As the head of the family," God, he can't even say it steadily, "you have my blessing."

Michelle stands and crosses to him, stares up into his face. Her eyes are still wet, but her chin is firm.

"If that's the story we're delivering, Jack, what about you? You're the one who accused David of treason, who tried to have him executed, and then—what? Tried to take the throne?"

She might be asking the question of the Ministry for Information, drilling for an official statement, but she's talking to her brother.

Jack glances at David, who has his head clutched in his hands, staring at the floor as though his life is written there in flaming letters. Maybe it is. God's not pulling punches today.

"I was deceived," Jack says. "Misled. No, shut the _hell_ up, Michelle, you think I of all people don't know the power of words? Here's some more. Controlled. Complicit. Weak." He swallows past a spike of acid. "Unfit."

"Jack." Michelle puts a hand on his arm. He shakes her off.

David lifts his head. He looks destroyed. "The peace has to hold."

"Yes," Jack says. "Right now, keeping the country intact is what's important. The _only_ thing."

" _I don't want to be king_."

"Too fucking bad," Jack says. He is three seconds away from wrapping his hands around David's perfect golden throat and shaking, screaming, clawing back his birthright. But it won't do any good. "God doesn't give us what we want."

* * *

"Two on the ground isn't going to be enough. You'll want angles from the far corners of the plaza as well, and—you know what, get Pete Durant to do the setup, he knows all this shit."

"Pete's not there," Lillian Syene cuts in. "He went home."

She sounds calm for someone who's been told to televise an event of this magnitude at almost no notice, but Jack's worked with her many times and he's never seen her as anything but a vision of serenity atop terrifying heels, which is why she was his first call. Right now Jack's phone is gently baking the cartilage of his ear and Syene is stuck in traffic, while a platoon of junior journalists and production assistants, most of whom were already at the palace for the ceremony, mill aimlessly around under the disapproving eye of security.

"What do you mean, he went home?"

"He was in the press corps at the handover ceremony," Syene says. "Standing right next to the shooter, he told me. He was terrified. Thought he was going to die."

"Sure," Jack says. "Yeah, that must have been really traumatic."

Syene's smart enough to catch that one. She pauses. "Your Highness—"

"Two cameras on the balcony, four on the ground," Jack says. "And aerial. Your helicopter's expense statements were landing on my desk, remember, I want to see it earning its fucking keep."

"Your Highness," Syene says. "I know how to do my job. And look, this cab hasn't moved for five minutes, so I'm getting out and walking. I'm at the corner of Derbe and Mount."

"Walk fast," Jack says.

"I'm—no, keep the change—I'm hanging up now," she says. In the background Jack hears the slam of a door followed by a sudden symphony of car horns and voices. "I need to call in your damn helicopter. Get Shepherd into a suit. Something photogenic."

Jack hangs up on her instead of bothering to argue. David would be photogenic in anything, including dirt and a torn T-shirt, and they're not trying to sell him as another well-dressed Benjamin monarch.

"Hey," he says. "Do you have another uniform?"

David pulls his own phone from his ear. "What?"

"A clean dress uniform," Jack says.

"Jack," David says, impatient, "this morning I was in a cell, waiting to be shot."

Jack rolls his eyes and waves over a young man with the keen-eyed, twitchy look of someone who could probably get you a five-course meal and some top shelf narcotics if the executive producer deemed it necessary.

"I need another full set of military dress blues, to fit Captain Shepherd. And one of mine, _without_ blood on them. And—" he casts a glance at Michelle "—I don't know, a selection of dresses, just grab a handful and Lillian will pick something out when she gets here."

David's been on the phone to his mother for ten minutes, and Jack can't tell whether it's going well or not. So far it's mostly been David reassuring her that he isn't currently face-down in the dust and riddled with bullet holes.

"Mom, listen," David says now. "Mom—no, _listen_. You're going to see something on television in an hour or so, all right? And it's real, and it's—it's going to change everything, but I want you to know. I need you to know that _I haven't changed_. Okay? No, I—"

Michelle reaches out and takes the phone from David's fingers.

"Mrs Shepherd?" she says. "It's Michelle Benjamin here. I don't know if you remember me, but you told me once that your son had a destiny. And that he had to be protected from it." She looks at David, steady. "I think you were half right."

"What about _your_ mother?" David says to Jack.

"Mother dearest is under house arrest," Jack says, feeling his mouth twist. "It's the most a judge would do at short notice."

David stares. "Shouldn't she be here? For this?"

He's got a point. Probably nobody at all would complain if the soon-to-be Queen Mother were allowed out of the house for this, the naming of the next monarch. What Jack isn't going to say is that the optics wouldn't be ideal. With Silas's death, their mother now belongs to the last generation of rulers. Out with the old, in with the new.

That doesn't change the fact that part of Jack wants to bury his face in the crisp panels of his mother's dress as though he were six years old again. Michelle hands the darkened phone to David and clings to his arm, and Jack feels—orphaned, and bitter.

"Your Highness," says Thomasina. "Captain Gerritz is here to discuss security arrangements for the announcement."

Gerritz is a veteran of three wars and was one of the senior members of Silas's security detail. Today's failure is scrawled all over his face. Jack nods to Thomasina: smart move, and a cold-blooded one, putting him in charge of this. Reward can be its own punishment. Jack would bet that Gerritz will personally throw himself in front of a hundred grenades before he lets any harm come to another member of the royal family.

Jack beckons Gerritz into a corner and discusses lines of sight and plainclothes security for twenty minutes, only to return and discover that David, the ungrateful shit, has come over all provincial at the prospect of the speeches taking place on the balcony overlooking Unity Plaza.

"No," David says. "That's not—I'll just do it from the ground."

"This is no time for your bullshit humility, Shepherd," Jack says.

"If I'm going to do this, I'm not going to be just another face high above them."

"Yes! You are! This is how it works."

"Jack," Michelle starts, but Jack flicks his gaze to her and she raises her hands. "Fine."

"This is the story," Jack says, brutal as he knows how. "This is an image that people will be rewatching, over and over again. They should be able to tell their grandchildren that they could _see_ it. See you."

"But—"

"David. Let me put it this way. If you're on the ground, I'm telling them to project your _face_ onto screens half as high as the palace."

David winces.

"That's what I thought," Jack says.

"Sir. Your Highness."

Jack looks around to see the twitchy production assistant, who's holding two suit bags and is trailed by someone with a rainbow armful of dresses.

"Good," Jack says, already loosening his tie. "You, what's your name?"

"Zach. Zachary, sir." Zachary is a skinny thing with hazel eyes who looks both all of nineteen and appropriately intimidated. He's chewing on his lower lip in a way that Jack might find distracting at any other time.

"Zachary, I don't want to bleed all over this one as well, so you're going to have to give me a hand."

David glances around like he's considering asking for a changing room. Jack looks him up and down, slowly enough that anyone with a scrap of self-consciousness would be blushing or preening under the regard. David just blinks back at him.

"It's not like there's much privacy in the army. I've been naked in front of two platoons," David says, with a hint of humour. Jack's mind undergoes a small moment of static and then recovers. "I was actually thinking about how many cameras are in the room at the moment."

"Cult of celebrity, Shepherd," Jack says. "Get comfortable with it."

Jack considers his bandaged arm and the blood that's stiffened and darkened to a rusty brown. No point trying to change his shirt, but with a new tie and clean jacket, nobody will know the difference.

"Jack, you really shouldn't be moving that arm at all. Please, find my brother a sling," Michelle tells Zachary.

"Yes ma'am," says Zachary.

Jack thinks about contradicting her. He runs the visual across his internal TV screen and sees a few flaws in it, but he's annoyed enough to want this for himself, this evidence that he didn't stand calmly by while his life went up in flames and the charred rubble collapsed around him.

And his arm's really fucking hurting.

A doctor finally turns up, looking harried and wearing stained scrubs. Jack's already got the new jacket on and he's itchy about the time, but he can feel both Thomasina's implacable gaze and Michelle's worried one, so he lets himself be stabbed in the thigh with an antibiotic shot as he's stepping out of one set of uniform pants and into another.

"Tetanus—" the doctor says, looking like she might wave another needle around, but her eyes catch on the gold wings at Jack's collar.

"Yeah," Jack says. "Believe me, I've had enough boosters to turn my arm dead for a month."

"I'll look at the wound after the ceremony," the doctor says firmly.

Lillian Syene arrives as Michelle is adjusting the strap of Jack's sling; a flurry of activity and noise from the baby journalists marks her movement through the room. Suddenly a lot of things are happening. Michelle changes into the dress that Syene picks out, a tailored blue that's not quite as dark as the uniforms Jack and David are wearing. Jack's arm is throbbing in time with his nervous pulse. David is staring at the floor again, his face grave and distant, folded in on himself. Thomasina is on her phone; she catches Jack's eye and tilts her head toward the door, where a member of security is looking very apologetic about patting Reverend Samuels down for weapons. Gerritz stands nearby with his arms crossed, not looking apologetic in the slightest.

Samuels walks across to them with his chin high, his shoulders solemn. He's always had that air of self-possession that stems from a conviction you could sharpen blades upon. He knows himself and he's at peace with himself. It makes Jack want to drink heavily, and always has.

"I am sorry for the loss you suffer," Samuels says to Jack and Michelle. "Your sorrow is my sorrow."

He bows his head, a hand on each of their shoulders. Their father is dead, _their father is dead_ —all over again it slams into Jack like shrapnel.

"Thank you," Michelle says. Samuels spares a softer, longer glance for her before he releases them and turns to David.

"Reverend," David says, awkwardly. "It's good to see you."

Jack wonders for a moment what would happen if David tried to run; whether Gerritz would stop him at the door or help him; whose _side_ people like Samuels and Thomasina are really on. By the look on David's face, he's wondering something similar, and resigning himself to wondering it often.

Samuels says, "I've known this day would come since the moment I met you. Your Majesty."

David doesn't flinch in the face of the title, but small muscles move in his cheeks.

"You know that party game?" he says. "Stupid, really, but they play it on television sometimes. Where you have a piece of paper stuck on your head, with the name of someone famous, and everyone else can see it but you."

Samuels gives a small smile. "Our destinies are often obscure to ourselves. That is true."

"I was always terrible at that game," David says. "Could never think of the right questions to ask."

" _God_ is asking the question," Samuels says, fervent. "All you have to do is say yes."

David closes his eyes for a moment. And nods.

"We're ready," says Syene. She's wearing a headset and she's burrowed in a leather jacket that's too large for her, taken off a production assistant after she draped her own smart white blazer around Michelle's shoulders. "And we're going to lose the light if we don't go now."

The walk to the balcony is like plunging through a fog of deja vu: Jack's collar snug around his throat, the foaming crashing sound of the crowd outside, a feeling like the edge of a cliff; oh, they've been here before.

Fingers close around Jack's good wrist and drag him sideways.

"David?" Michelle says, and, "Captain Shepherd!" from Perry, but David keeps moving, separating Jack from the pack of advisors and uniforms.

"Give us a second," Jack says, over his shoulder. "No, _stay there_ ," when a couple of the guards make to follow them. "Shepherd, what the hell are you doing?"

"I can't. I can't do it."

 _David_ hasn't been here before. David is the colour of the pillars around them, yellow-white and gleaming with fear.

"You can," Jack says, trying to pull him back the other way. "You will."

"No." David's a rock, immovable. Jack gives up. "What am I supposed to say? To all those people?"

"Wing it," Jack says. "Divine inspiration, right? It's what my father would have done."

David says, "But I'm not," and then stops. He looks like he will either cry or laugh. He does neither. "Jack. I'm _sorry_. I know this is—God. You must hate me."

Jack holds his bitterness in his mouth and grasps David by the shoulder. He kisses him swiftly on the cheeks, one after the other. David's skin is hot and the smell of him is sweet like nerve gas, corrupting Jack's senses. Jack wants to snarl at him, wants to bite at his perfect lips until they bleed.

"David," he says, "believe me, this would be so much easier if I hated you."

David takes a few deep breaths, staring at Jack like he's drowning and Jack has the rope that will save him.

Jack says, "You heard her: we're losing the light. Get out there so they can look at you. We're telling a story here, remember?"

"Yes," David says.

Jack waits, jaw clenched.

"All right," David says. "I'm ready. I'm sorry."

"And stop fucking apologising," says Jack. "A king doesn't apologise."

David squares his shoulders; sets his mouth. God's will resonates in this marble space, rippling around them like the echo of something distant and unimaginably loud. It still burns, but Jack thinks he might be starting to get used to it.

"A king should," David says.

Reverend Samuels leads the way onto the balcony, and he's also the first to step up to the centre with its hidden microphones. Jack stands by David's shoulder and watches the helicopter where it hovers, whirring like a dark bird against the pinkish, cloud-dotted sky, high above the crowd that fills the plaza from edge to edge.

Samuels inhales with gravity. He raises his hands. He speaks as though the city itself is a church.

"On this bloody day, God grieves with you. He wants you to grieve. But He also wants you to rejoice."

The media will already have told the people of Gilboa what has happened. They're here because they want to be told how to feel about it, and what will happen _next_ , and the good Reverend doesn't disappoint. Samuels tells them a story; he tells them how on Inauguration Day his car broke down on a country road, and a boy in a green jacket brought it back to life with duct tape and a smile, and refused to take anything more than a broken watch in payment for it. Samuels tells them, in a voice stern and sodden with faith, how God was moving in the sunshine that day.

"Two years later," Samuels says, "that boy was a war hero. He saved the king's son. He marched out under the guns of our enemies and shouted for peace. And on top of all that, he had fixed my watch."

Jack taps his fingertips against his own leg— _beat_ —and is satisfied with the pause Samuels leaves, letting the narrative settle around them.

"The signs are there, to those of us with eyes. King Silas knew this as well as any of us. And so did I know, on that first day and on every day since, that this was a young man destined for greatness. People of Gilboa, this is your next God-chosen king. And it lightens my heart to tell you that although not Silas's son in blood, he could have been his son by law, and by love."

He pauses again, glancing deliberately over his shoulder at where Michelle stands on David's other side. A lively breeze of noise runs through the crowd.

Samuels says, "It is faith that sustains us in the darkness. It is hope which shows us the glimmer on the horizon. But it is love that lights the world. Captain Shepherd, Princess Michelle. May your union have all possible blessings."

Jack leans his weight onto his toes and moves his eyes to look at his sister, who is pale and bright-eyed and has something in her face that Jack recognises, abruptly, as the same guilty freedom that's been churning in his own chest.

"I believe in David Shepherd, the soldier who brought down a Goliath. I believe in David Shepherd, the hero who restored the Charter of Gilboa to us. But most of all, I believe in David Shepherd, the boy who could fix anything. He can mend this country; more than that, he can restore it. He can lead it."

You have to admire the showmanship there. It's a great story. Jack couldn't have written it better. Perry's historical-record boner is probably visible from the far side of the plaza; he's standing off to one side scribbling and flipping, page after page, like a man who's done two lines of the best cocaine money can buy.

"The king is dead," says Samuels. "Long live the king."

If Jack were actually scripting this he'd have a note, there: pause for applause. But there is none. A hush has settled over the crowd, perhaps over Shiloh itself. Perhaps this silence covers Gilboa from one hard-won border to another.

David's gone sickly pale again, when Samuels steps back from the microphones and gestures to him. Jack's out of ideas that don't involve punching some sense into the man—he _knows_ David's got more courage than this, he's seen it with his own eyes—but Michelle steps in gracefully. In full view of the crowd she presses a kiss to David's mouth and then leaves her hand on his cheek, a gentle benediction to reinforce the one in Samuels' words.

"Breathe," she says. "I believe in you too."

David stands parade-straight under the eyes of the world. He clears his throat, twice. And then he tells the story of the watch from the other side: how he turned it over and saw the wings engraved on the back, and he felt a kind of glow. How happy he was that the glory of kings and of God had found its way into his mother's garage on that day of all days.

"I was proud to carry that watch with me, when I fought in the Gilboan army alongside some of the bravest men I've ever known. And I was proud, afterwards, to be called to the capital to serve."

David pauses. There are thousands of people out there, but the whole of the air pauses with him. When he speaks again something has shifted in the timbre of his voice. He looks somehow larger, and in sharper focus, than the David Shepherd who is constantly trying to escape from the centre of a room. His words flow with the smoothness of new history.

"I have always believed in the king, even when he did not believe in me. I have always been a true servant of this country, and I have always fought for unity and for peace. And I don't have to tell you that the people up here with me are the ones who have defended my loyalty, and my life, even when it cost them to do so."

He looks at Jack. That'll be the cameras, too, swinging to him. Jack can't quite manage to smile, but he nods, and keeps his eyes on David's face.

"I have to be honest," David says to the crowd. "This is not where I expected to be. This is the _last_ place I expected to be. Earlier today I was in front of a firing squad, fearing—knowing, as I thought, beyond a doubt—that my life was about to end. I would not have wished death on anyone: not myself, not King Silas, not any of the men pointing guns at me. No one. But I've learned today that wishes are chaff; life is what happens. Life is what remains. The fact that I am standing here now, alive, seems like nothing less than a miracle. If this is a call to service, then I have heard it, and I am humbled by it."

A cloud creeps to the side, letting through a ray of light from the setting sun which falls onto David as precisely as a spotlight in a nightclub. The cameras won't even have to try.

David says, "I know I am not the king you had this morning. I'm not the king you expected. But I promise you now, with everything I have, that I will strive to be the king you deserve."

The cheering starts small but everywhere at once, in scattered pockets of fervour that surge and spread and coalesce until the plaza before them is ablaze with passionate noise. Jack is close enough to see how it rocks David back on his feet, the tiny shift of weight that he is too much a soldier to betray with any more than that. David's face is bewildered and bathed in sunlight.

* * *

David's first act as heir-elect is to ratify the peace treaty, handing Port Prosperity over to Gath. You can see his mouth form strange painful shapes around the words. He does it anyway.

"The peace has to hold," Jack says, afterwards.

He thinks he might be trying to apologise. Which is ridiculous considering that David either has, or is, everything that Jack has ever wanted.

David looks at him. Jack tries to remember what happiness looks like on David, if he's ever even _seen_ it on him, and can't.

"Yes," David says.

* * *

They usher Lucinda into the room with a formality that should give her fair warning, if she's even the smallest bit smarter than she seems. Her dress is a sheath in a dark wine colour: unexceptionable, appropriate. If she stood for long enough against the walls of any room in the palace, she might fade right into them, an animal adapted to its environment for survival purposes.

Jack can't tell, from the way she looks at him, how she feels about this. To be overlooked for this long, only to be now delivered into Jack's presence like a parcel.

"Jack," she says. "I'm so sorry."

Jack looks at her blankly. The knowledge of his father's death crashes in sideways again, like a drunk at a party.

"Right," he says. "Yeah. Thanks. It is what it is."

Lucinda wraps her arms around her elbows, balanced on her spike heels. A few weeks ago she might have crossed the room to him, tried to hug him, offer comfort. What Jack is about to say must be semi-expected, then. She's not that fucking stupid. She can't be. She is still going to wait for him to say it.

Suddenly her mousey silence, her melting eyes, infuriate Jack. He swallows down bile and levels his voice. "Lucinda," he says. "I'm breaking off our engagement."

"I…" she says. "Oh." Her eyes flick to Marshall, the guard at the door today, with the implication of memory. It's the closest she's going to come to either accusation or blame. Oil simmers in Jack's stomach. Why can't she just spit it out? Hell, Jack's own father snarled it for everyone to hear; if it still mattered, the incident could be spun as an indiscriminate insult, as Silas simply striking out, but what's the point in spinning it now? Jack will never be king.

"Hey, it's for the best. I never loved you, and now there's no reason for me to pretend that I want you."

Lucinda flinches.

"Fuck," Jack says. "Sorry. I'm sorry."

Her earnest, fondue eyes search him. Jack feels restless, snakes in his heels, but forces himself to be still. Lucinda drops her arms to her sides; she looks very alone, and like her poise is costing her. She maintains it, though. Jack's mother would be so pleased with her.

"I'm sorry too," she says.

The word _sorry_ is starting to lose meaning. Jack would like to shred it between his teeth.

He says, "That kind of marriage wouldn't be fair to either of us."

"I would have been a good wife," Lucinda says.

She would have faded into the walls of Jack's life, perfectly. He would have stopped seeing her. He would have ripped her apart anyway.

"Sweetheart," Jack says, "I would have been a terrible fucking husband."

It has the ring of an ending to it. If this were proper theatre, there'd be a beat, and then a scene change. Instead the two of them look at one another, and then away. This is so fucking awkward, though at least it's _done_ , and never ever again will Jack have to plaster another poor woman over his skin in disguise.

Soft knuckles, on the door, and then the click of heels lower than those on Lucinda's feet.

"Hi," Michelle says. "Sorry, am I interrupting?"

She's not sorry and she knows exactly what this is. Jack exhales in a gust of gratitude.

His sister goes on: "Only I'd like to steal Lucinda for a while, if you don't mind."

"You're not interrupting," Jack says. "We're done here."

On impulse he picks up Lucinda's hand on his way out and squeezes it. She catches his gaze with her own.

"I understand," she says. There is some odd smothered emotion in her voice. "I'll be fine, don't worry about me."

It had not occurred to him to be worried on her behalf. Now, like an unpleasant shock of static, he wonders if he should be.

"We're done here," he says again.

Lucinda nods, and releases his hand.

* * *

David's coronation and his wedding to Michelle take place on the same day. The whole thing is catalogued so thoroughly by the greedy eyes of cameras that Jack feels no guilt about letting his own mind wander and escape. History will sweep them all through this day whether he pays attention or not. The only image that arrests him, holds him, and chars itself into his mind, never to be forgotten, is this: David bending his knee to a cushion and bowing his head. The crown of beaten gold nestling itself into David's hair as though it's never wanted to be anywhere else.

"God save the king," says Samuels.

"God save the king," says Perry. It's not meant to be a call and response, but the chronicler's voice has a choirboy purity, spreading like wings to fill the room.

When David stands, it's slowly, as though fighting a great weight. Jack has been feeling the hands of God on his own shoulders since the ceremony began, a forbidding tension only distinguishable from stress by the impossible scent of rain. He wonders what David is feeling.

The evening's celebration is part wedding reception and part furious game of see-and-be-seen, speak-and-be-heard. Anyone with money, influence, title or brazen guts has crammed their way into the largest ballroom in Shiloh. The kingdom of Gilboa has a king and a queen again, and the sharks are circling close. The matter of first blood will be to everyone's interest.

Jack absents his brain from the dinner and most of the speeches, and then cushions himself against the growing urge to be the one to draw that blood by seating himself at the bar and removing his tie. The nearest pretty face in an anonymous white shirt veers towards him, bowtie leading the way, and sets about proving himself anxious to provide the new king's new brother-in-law with as much alcohol as he desires.

Three whiskies later, Jack is watching David Shepherd, King of Gilboa, wander stiff-legged from one cluster of guests to another. People keep closing their hands around the perfect sleeve of David's suit; if Jack were closer, he might be able to see a crease forming there. David's shoulders are solid. His smile keeps forming, freezing, shrinking, and re-forming as he's confronted with face after face, name after name. Once or twice the light of the smile makes it to his cheekbones, but never higher.

"Champagne," Jack says abruptly, lifting two fingers.

He takes the flutes across the room and plants himself, just drunk enough to find the irony amusing as well as hideous, in David's vacated seat at the high table. Michelle whispers something to Paul Ash, who pats her shoulder and directs a look of frank dislike at Jack before heading back into the throng. A fishhook of caution grabs at Jack's chest. He'll think about it later.

"Here," Jack says.

Michelle takes the glass with a smile that doesn't climb much higher than her new husband's. She lets Jack clink his own against it, but hesitates. Her fingertips are as pale as the skirts that spill out from her waist. She exhales and puts the champagne on the table, untasted.

"Thanks," she says. "I'm not drinking tonight."

"Aw," Jack drawls, "do we want to lay down some precious memories? Cut the crap, Michelle, I know you hate these parties even when you're not being paraded around in yards of tulle. Drink up."

"Jack," Michelle says sharply. "I said no."

Jack snorts into his own glass. "What's the matter, sis? Saint David managed to knock you up already?"

It's a loud room. A band is playing. Almost seven hundred people are trying to outdo one another in conversation. Between Jack Benjamin and his twin sister, however, falls a private and deafening silence. Michelle's face undergoes a moment like an electric shock. Jack coughs around a spike of carbonation that tries to crawl up his nose.

"Fuck," he says, when he can breathe. "I was—fuck, _really_?"

Agonised: "Jack—"

Jack whistles, cutting her off. He starts to stand. He sways a little as he does so. "I'd better go and congratulate the father-to-be."

Michelle grabs his arm and pulls him back down. Her fingers dig in through shirt and jacket; Jack thinks of David again, stiff within his formal armour. Michelle's voice is very low. "He doesn't know."

The inebriative effect of the last three drinks is flayed from Jack by sheer surprise. Now, when he looks at Michelle, he is actually seeing her. Fine lines of panic rim her eyes. The actual truth of her situation begins to sink in.

He says, "Are you planning to…do something about it?"

That idea doesn't fill him with any particular emotion. It seems so out of character for his sister as to be surreal, but so is the fact that she's kept her own counsel this long. _Michelle_ , who won't keep a secret even when the alternative is riots and plague-panic. These are new times for all of them.

Michelle inhales so sharply it's almost a gasp. "No! No, of _course_ —of course I'm keeping it. But it's never been the right time." She glances down onto the dance floor, where David is dancing awkwardly with Julia Weaver. "I'm going to tell him tonight."

"Hell of a wedding present."

Michelle turns the flat, unhappy line of her mouth on him, and Jack leans across to kiss her temple. She smells like expensive perfume.

"I'm happy for you, sis. I'm on your side. You know that."

When they were six years old, Jack fell off his bike and broke his arm—the same arm that's healing nicely from a bullet wound, now—and found out later that Michelle, miles away at a piano lesson, halted in the middle of playing scales and screamed as though something had crawled up the keys and bitten her. They never had their own verbal language, as some twins do, but they had an understanding. When they were older, and Michelle was dying, Jack felt like a hole had been poked in him, a pin thrust through a balloon full of water. He felt like the essence of him was slowly leaking away.

He should have known this somehow. Fuck logic. This is big enough that _he should have known_.

"Does Mom know?"

Michelle nods.

"Great little piece in the story we're selling. A dynasty. Perfect." Jack drains the rest of his champagne. "How long, then?"

Michelle's hands clench around the cloth napkin, low in her lap, just as they did on the day their father died. "Nine weeks," she says.

"Less perfect," Jack says, dry. "But I'm sure we can make it work. I don't think the Ministry of Information listens to me any more, but you could try Lillian Syene, she could help you hammer out an official timeline."

Michelle shoots an eyebrow-raised look around the room. Jack follows it, but he can't see Syene anywhere. The last time he saw her, she was on the phone to a hapless staff photographer's editor, probably getting the man not only fired but blacklisted for some infraction of her rules, while the unfortunate in question clutched his camera nearby and turned the same shade as the bisque they'd eaten for the first course.

"Look, Jack, I know that Lillian is doing a good job of stage-managing my husband, my wedding—"

"Michelle."

"I'm not putting her on permanent retainer!"

"Pity," Jack says. "You should."

"This is—" she lowers her voice to a hiss "—this is a _child_ , Jack. This is me and David, having a child. You know what this means to me."

Jack nods. He reaches out an arm in both invitation and apology, and Michelle allows herself to be folded into his embrace. Jack lays his cheek against his sister's temple and closes his eyes. The beading of her dress scratches his palm and Jack thinks suddenly about the way a man's jaw feels, unshaven, and he can't stop the champagne-driven surge that roils through him. Bubbles of desire and shame in equal measure.

He says, "Then get the story right, sis. Come on, let's dance."

He drinks half of Michelle's champagne before they make their way down to the dance floor; better not have someone see the glass sitting there, full, and draw the correct conclusion. He folds her hand in his own, ignores the jab of pain in his arm that's trying and failing to get past the who-gives-a-fuck buffer of alcohol, and pulls her right into the centre of the floor.

David's dancing with someone else now, a cropped-short head of black hair above a slinky peacock of a dress; Jack doesn't recognise her. Maybe someone's cut their hair. People used to do that, in mourning, or even at births. Women do it after breakups. Memento fucking mori. Slice off the dead cells and remind yourself of the shape of your skull.

Jack pulls his eyes away before David can catch him staring, and focuses on Michelle, instead. She feels both stronger and more fragile in his arms, knowing what he knows now. When he spins her under his arm, the layers of her skirt flow out and catch on his legs.

"You look beautiful," he says, very quiet, when he pulls her close again.

Michelle gives him a look like her heart is being wrung. She puts her cheek against his. It's almost a kiss. She breathes into his ear, "Jack. We need you, you _know_ that. If you won't stay for him, do it for me. Please."

She pulls back. The gaze of her brimming eyes glides over his shoulder, like David is looking over his partner's, like everyone in this whole damn room is always _looking_. Michelle might not have a politician's heart, but she's sure as hell got the instincts of one.

Jack's not even close to mustering a response to her words before Michelle says, "Brace yourself," with a hint of ink-black humour, and releases both his hands as the person she was looking at sweeps her own way to stand beside them.

"Don't the two of you look lovely," their mother says. She puts a hand on each of their shoulders.

"Don't we?" says Jack.

His mother's hand tightens on his shoulder for less than a heartbeat. Her smile flicks on like a light. The rings on her fingers look like they would tear flesh, if she raised her hand to someone's cheek. Anyone's cheek. Her son's, to take a random example. Jack can feel one of his more unpleasant smiles settling itself onto his lips in response to hers; in his mind he keeps hearing her voice say, _a character decision_.

"May I cut in?" she asks.

"Of course," says Michelle.

Rose Benjamin, the brand new Queen Mother, is officially out on bail. She's spending her time away from Shiloh, at a country estate that belonged to her long before she married Silas. Tonight, she looks exactly like herself. Perhaps a little harder, and more deliberately poised, but you'd have to know her well to see it. Jack has to remind herself that she is not just his mother, the consummate politician's wife and one of the most ruthless people he's ever known; she is a woman still recovering from her husband's death and her arrest for the public murder of her own brother. Not to mention seeing the succession be wrenched sideways from her family.

They dance for almost an entire song without either of them starting conversation. Neither do they manage to maintain eye contact for more than a few seconds.

When they come to a halt, Jack pushes the words out. He knows they're due, no matter what else has passed between them.

"Thank you."

The ringed fingers squeeze his. "I told you, I'd do it again," she says, low.

"I know."

Now, they can look at one another. Jack doesn't have to raise his eyes at all. Like Lucinda, his mother has always favoured these weapon-like heels.

"How are you?" she asks.

"I'm not in prison."

"Is there a danger of that?" Her eyes dart away for a moment. To David, Jack assumes. "If that presumptuous foot soldier, that _farmer_ —"

"Uh-uh." Jack tuts. "That's our God-anointed ruler you're talking about." The particular cadence of her voice around _foot soldier_ , he tucks away for himself, as a warning. In some ways he and his mother have always been similar. In some ways, she is alien, angles and aspects of her still striking him like bullets out of the blue.

"Go on, my dear. Tell me you believe that." She sounds tired. "I might even manage to believe you."

Jack tries another smile on for size. He leaves her standing there, on her towering heels, in the middle of the dance floor.

There's a young woman behind the bar now, with deep brown skin and an edifice of braids that seems incongruous above the servers' uniform. Plenty of women on tonight's guest list probably paid a small fortune for their hairstyles, and not half of them look as striking as this girl. Jack acquires another double whisky, with enough ice to remind him to sip.

"Long day," someone says.

Jack turns. Graham Weaver is leaning an arm on the bar; he catches the server's eye, points at Jack's drink and then to himself.

"History in the making," Jack replies.

Weaver accepts his own drink. His cufflinks are small shields stamped with a logo, or a coat of arms, that Jack doesn't recognise. "Ah, yes," he says. "The birth of a new era. And we'd barely had time to enjoy the last one." His eyes are blue and calm. "I'm truly sorry about King Silas. I was lucky enough to consider him a friend."

 _When it suited you_ , Jack thinks. Weaver's development company improved its share price tenfold during the rebuilding of Shiloh; the man deals in the currency of favours and Jack isn't sure how far Silas indulged him, how closely he flirted with Weaver's outright corruption.

"Yeah, I know he valued your opinion," Jack says.

Weaver's eyes sharpen. Jack resists the urge to take a drink; his instincts are prickling dimly at him.

"I was watching you at the coronation, Your Highness."

"Then we were staging it wrong." Fuck it. Jack takes the drink anyway. "You were meant to be looking at the guy with the crown."

"Mm." Weaver is looking at him. Searching him. "I should have been, shouldn't I?"

It has, actually, been a long day. Jack has been drinking steadily. What Weaver is artfully not-saying takes almost ten seconds to sink in, and when it does, Jack takes down a gulp of air with his next swallow and has to cough into the cuff of his own sleeve for a while. Just like his mother's bitterness, this is the colourful fletching on the other end of the fishhook. Jack was always supposed to be king. Everyone knows it. The world has begun to pick sides for him, and it has placed him confidently on the one opposite to David.

Weaver seems to take Jack's silence, after the coughing fit, as wariness. But not as disagreement. He shifts closer and hoists an arm around Jack's shoulders, and his hand is heavy at the back of Jack's neck. Avuncular. And isn't that just the _aptest_ word. His mouth almost touches Jack's ear when he speaks, and Jack thinks of Michelle, and Jack's eyes pick David effortlessly from the crowd. It's not hard. Light seems to follow David; everyone around him looks washed-out, somehow, in comparison. The guy with the crown. Jack's insides writhe in a nauseating way.

"I hope you will consider me a friend, just as your father did," Weaver says. "I hope you realise that you do have…friends."

Jack grips his glass until he feels his nail beds blanch. David is smiling again, no more convincingly than before. David's gaze sweeps over the ballroom and for a moment Jack thinks they'll be looking at one another, but it doesn't happen.

"Right, of course," Jack says. "Who doesn't want friends?"

* * *

"Do you need an ambulance, or will coffee do?"

Jack opens his eyes. His back is one long cramp. Morning light and morning traffic have barely begun to fill the world. He's—where is he? Sitting slumped against a tall door embedded in black brick, hands white with cold and lack of motion, two platoons' worth of grunts slamming their metal-toed boots against the inside of his skull.

"Did you hear me?" A woman's voice, losing patience. Jack squints sideways. Someone is looming over him, in the process of opening the door.

A moment of nausea like a shimmering soap bubble rises, brims, blinds him, and then subsides without forcing him to empty his gnawing stomach. Now he remembers how he came to be here, if not where here is. For two weeks _resentful_ has lived at the top of the list of descriptors that Jack has been building around his own life, narrowly beating out _bored_. He considered _in need of a drink_ for all of two days before realising that there was an easy way to fix that one. Thus explaining his current situation.

"Fuck," he says. He leans his forehead against the half of the door that has stayed mercifully closed.

"Are you coming in?"

That seems incongruous enough that Jack forces himself to focus, ignoring the nail of pain that this drives between his eyes. From his present position the woman is mostly coat, with a pair of sensible slacks ending in a pair of even more sensible shoes.

Jack laughs. He sounds like a long-abandoned train being dragged over rusting tracks. "Thanks, but no thanks. This is such a comfortable doorstep."

After a moment, the woman crouches down, making enough of a performance of it that Jack revises her age upwards by a couple of decades. A pair of hazel eyes appear at his level, boring out of the creased face like jewels in a seam of rock.

"Here's the thing," she says. "Technically it's illegal to be a vagabond on city property. Vagabond, did you know that was a legal term? Now you do. Did you know this comfortable doorstep belongs to the National Library of Gilboa? Now you do. So I'm well within my rights to call the cops and have your ass dragged off to the watch house."

This strikes Jack as extremely funny. His next laugh is no healthier, but the woman must hear something in it, because she levers herself to her feet with a series of clicks and huffs, and then extends a hand down to him.

"Well?" she says. "You coming in, or not?"

Jack manages, "To the _library_?"

She shrugs. "Maybe you like sleeping on stones where your fellow drunks have been pissing. No skin off my back. Only I've a chair in the office that's a sight softer than this concrete, and my doctor's been telling me I shouldn't drink the whole pot of coffee myself."

Jack takes her hand. The cramp of his back gives a series of hideous smaller cramps as he stands, and then it feels better. Everything about this is surreal. But it's not like Jack has anything better to do with his morning.

"You get a lot of drunks pissing on your steps?"

"Only the anti-intellectual ones," she says, startling a snort of laughter out of Jack.

She leads Jack into the huge public foyer of the library and almost immediately through a nondescript side door, then down a series of beige corridors, where she has to pause and switch on lights before they move forward into the next section of the building. Each one piles a block onto the teetering stack of Jack's hangover.

"I didn't think any libraries opened this early," Jack says.

"We don't," she says, not sounding pleased about it. "Some hotshot academic's leaving town this morning for a conference and desperately needs to check a couple of references he overlooked, and I happen to owe his thesis supervisor a favour. Lucky for you."

"Yeah," Jack says. "Lucky for me."

The last light illuminates a cramped office in which some sort of book explosion appears to have taken place, where Jack's guide sheds her coat and drapes it over a chair. She's a heavyset woman of Jack's own height. Above the dull pants she's wearing a startling flame-orange blouse dotted with tiny flowers.

"You can call me Nancy," she says.

"Jack," Jack says, bracing himself, but she just nods thoughtfully, as if he's reminded her of a story. Maybe he has. Jack's probably not looking his best, and although a chunk's just been bitten out of his vanity—he _is_ one of the most famous people in the fucking country—context is a powerful thing. There are men on both sides of the war who never knew they were in the company of the Prince of Gilboa; exhausted and covered in mud, one man is much like another.

Until one of those men walks across an active battlefield and takes down a tank, Jack's mind whispers nastily.

"Sit," Nancy says, when the coffee's on. "I'm going to go and open the archive."

In her absence Jack sits for almost a full minute in a chair which is, as promised, more comfortable than the concrete—not a difficult achievement—before curiosity propels him up again. Nancy's office is books on all sides, spewed over surfaces, neat in shelves, stacked on tables. There are scuff marks on the walls around ankle height, the carpet is blue flecked with black, and the chair behind the desk looks twice as expensive as anything else: soft and ergonomic leather in the matte black of guns and good suits. A nameplate on the desk, once it has been nudged free of a pile of papers, informs Jack that his host's full name is Nancy Pandanus. The room's overall impression is still that of a natural disaster, or perhaps a feeding frenzy. A literary swarming.

When Nancy returns, Jack's fingers are skimming the top of the computer monitor.

"Bold choice, leaving the drunk alone in the office," he says, leaning against the edge of the desk. "You weren't afraid I'd take your valuables and run?"

"If you were that strapped for cash you'd have started with that watch," Nancy says, darting her eyes to it as she hands him a mug full of coffee. "Sugar and creamer are in the cupboard if you want them."

Jack looks down at the pale gold strip emerging from the cuff of his jacket as he accepts the mug. "My father gave me this watch," he says, and then takes a small and furious bite of the inside of his mouth, genuinely surprised at himself. He'd blame the hangover, but it's not just that. It's the feeling of dislocation, of being in a totally new environment. It's the combination of this woman's charitable actions with the total lack of compassion in her demeanour. Jack's losing his edge. Not that he has anything to be fucking sharpening himself for; he might as well go dull, unused and unnoticed.

He swallows a mouthful of coffee. It's scalding and bitter and good.

"So tell me about yourself," he says, tapping the nameplate. "Nancy Pandanus."

Mostly this is to see if she'll give as much as she's managed to take. Nancy shrugs and keeps up a stream of chatter as she boots up her computer, pours her own coffee, shifts papers around the desk, and sweeps proprietary eyes over the books in the room like a shepherd over a flock; as though despite the appearance of sameness to an outsider, she could name every one instantly. Jack learns that Nancy Pandanus is the Assistant Librarian of the Gilboan National Library. Jack has an ear for hierarchy; he gets the impression, from the way she pronounces it with audible capitalisation, that there's only one Librarian and only one Assistant, making her second-in-command. All others are mere librarians.

Nancy is native Selahnese; an ex-separatist, she adds with surprising ease. Until now her conversation has been generous but never closely personal.

"Ex?" Jack says, casual into his mug.

"Do you know anything about the Knights of Selah?"

Warily, "As much as anyone."

"Wrong," she says, with the closest thing to cheerfulness Jack's seen yet. "Not as much as me. I grew up among those assholes, and half my family still believe in the cause. Give me a minute and I'll recite the first page of the manifesto. _In the name of God whose discrete creation was the land of Selah and whose people must fight for the independent governance He first granted them_ —you know, all that nonsense."

"Fuck," Jack says. "And now you're what, for unification?"

"I'm for peace," Nancy says. "The Knights have lost the battle. They're irrelevant."

"They're a symptom," Jack says.

Nancy scoffs. "They're a weak sneeze, at best. Maybe if they had a strong leader. But ever since Kennick died they've been trying to run a radical fringe group by committee."

An automatic part of Jack has the urge to sit this woman down with a tape recorder and hook everything useful out of her. But...for what? To what purpose? This isn't his job any more; there's no such thing as useless intelligence unless you, yourself, have no use.

"Why this?" Jack nods around the room. "Why a library?"

Nancy shrugs. "Can't shake off the history, but I like organising it. Like the idea of reading it as it's being created. Everything's new these days. Not just the king."

"King David." Jack swirls his coffee. Some of it slops out over his fingers. He takes a deep breath, and the next swirl is less violent. "What do you think of our new sovereign, then?"

Nancy looks at him. She adjusts, and then adjusts again, her grip on the mug. Her fingernails are painted a dark green.

"He seems a nice boy," Nancy says finally. "Well-meaning, which is more than you can say for most. Naïve. But he's got something. I think he'll do well, if the power doesn't eat him up."

Fuck it. Jack's not going to get many chances to ask these things without a polling company or two layers of preconceptions between him and his target. Useless or not, this part is his own sheer curiosity. He pushes off the desk, turns restlessly on his heel. Takes a deep breath.

"Do you think God wants him to be king?"

"Now there's a question with corners built into it," Nancy says. "You're not asking me what I think, with a question like that. You're asking me what I believe. You're assuming I _believe_ in anything."

"A Selahnese ex-separatist atheist librarian." Jack barks out a laugh. "You should have a business card."

"Now, I didn't say that." Nancy's mouth is a line.

"Then you believe in God?"

"I," Nancy says. She walks over to one of the bulging shelves as if in search of a book, but in the end she just strokes a hand over a row of spines, as though soothing an animal or gathering strength. Then she goes and sits in the black chair, and opens a drawer in the desk. "I believe. It's the business side of things I'm less keen on. The church has a lot of power, and it's very personal power."

Jack won't argue that.

"The thing is, Jack," says Nancy, holding out a small piece of paper, "I'm ambivalent about a system of belief that doesn't believe in me."

Jack takes it. It's a photograph, scratched and with one corner torn: Nancy, younger and thinner, with her arm around the waist of a woman with blonde curls. The blonde woman has a child in her arms, no more than a couple of years old; the child has looked away from the camera and is reaching a chubby hand towards Nancy's face.

Jack looks up into those lapidary eyes.

She knows exactly who he is.

Nancy says, "Now you have power over me. Could lose me my job. Could make my neighbourhood uncomfortable for my family to live in."

Jack has to force himself to relax his clenched jaw. "I think you know I'm not going to do that," he says.

Nancy takes the photograph back; her hand is not as steady as it was. As always, the tangible evidence of someone else's fear helps Jack to relax. She's right. She practically pulled him out of the gutter and brought him into her realm, this dour and unflappable woman, and still she's handed him everything he needs to destroy her. Jack's more used to smiles like lacquered fortresses. It's unnerving. He doesn't know what she _wants_. Everyone wants something.

The photo disappears back into the drawer.

"In answer to your question, Your Highness," says Nancy Pandanus, "I'll make up my mind about King David when history does. When I know what the books will say about him."

"At least they'll say something about him," comes out of Jack.

"Ouch," Nancy says. It's neutral, but anger rises in Jack along with a new crest of nausea.

"I'm nothing," Jack spits. "I'm a prince, and I'm not. There's no role for me in David's kingdom. I'm just— _unmoored_." Ladies and gentleman, we have a winner. Better than _resentful_ ; better than _bored_. Someone's untied him and set him adrift.

"All right," Nancy says, steady. "It doesn't sound a barrel of laughs. But it's not uncommon. A lot of us wish we knew what we're supposed to be doing."

Wishes are chaff, Jack thinks. A fresh spike of pain lands behind his left eye, and he gulps coffee until it settles.

Nancy adds, "Hell, boy, if all you want is your name in the history books, then blow up a building. Mow down some children."

"Stage a coup?" Jack suggests. "Kill a king?"

She looks at him narrowly. "Seems the jury's still out on how many fingers you had in that pie."

The jury hasn't been consulted yet. This is one of the things Jack was trying to block out, when he hit three—four?—different clubs in quick succession last night. He didn't take anyone along. He wonders if the tabloids will even bother to report on it; Jack's neither an eligible bachelor nor the heir to the throne, not any more, and there are already enough drunk photos of him out there to fill a calendar year.

Jack sets down his coffee mug on a pile of books that seems to have above-average structural integrity, and takes some purposeful steps to hover in the office doorway. "I'd better go. I have to—"

He doesn't; he doesn't have anywhere to be. Nobody is expecting him, or will miss him. He could sleep off his headache right here on Nancy's comfortable chair. But it would mean more than he's prepared to admit, if he sat down again now.

"Your Highness," Nancy says, into the weakness of his pause. She fires her serious gaze at him over the computer monitor. "Jack. I have to ask—it's true, then? About you?"

"Yes," Jack says. "Yeah, I'm—"

His throat works; his mouth is dry. He doesn't know if it's the enormity of saying it, here and now, or if it's that there is no neutral word to put next in the sentence. Every possible term has some form of poison attached.

"Does it help?" he asks Nancy instead. "Being able to say it aloud?"

"Help whom?" she says, blunt. "Help them with what?"

 _Me_ , Jack rages, _me, me_ , but the unexpected cynicism of her reply is like water thrown over that fire. He blinks.

"I'm no martyr," Nancy says. "I've lied every day of my life since I was thirteen, one way or another. And I'll keep on doing it. Truth's only worth the good it can do."

"I keep hiding it, then," he says, a challenge.

"Maybe," she says. "Or maybe do something with it."

A memory of Joseph's hand in his—the bridge, the blackout, one night of reckless freedom that felt fragile as eggshells—mingles with a memory of his mother's hand hot and stinging on his cheek. It's never done anything good, this truth. All the good he ever tried to suck from it turned to fucking ashes in the end.

"Thanks for the coffee," he says. And leaves.

* * *

Whomever designed the audience seats in the royal court room did not mean for anyone to be able to fall asleep in them. Not that Jack intends to, but it'd be nice to know that the option was there, if he wanted to make a statement by doing so. He's managed to get his feet up, defiant on the seat in front, and he watches the proceedings of David's cabinet through low-lidded eyes. Sometimes he feels like angry ghosts will leak out of the walls, or like half of his life has taken place in this room. The court room. In this case _court_ was deliberately used for both senses of the word: both a place of justice and a place where the government meets. The phrase _holding court_ has a whiff of the archaic, but it still fits.

David, seated in the centre, does not look like a man who is holding anything; at least, not tightly. He is the youngest person at the table, and the suit he's wearing makes him look even younger. So far he hasn't spoken much. The Minister for Information and the Unity News Network, if they know what's good for them, will report this approach as thoughtful, and contemplative, and evidence of the king's measured wisdom. Jack would put money on the fact that David simply got lost two minutes ago in the marshy intricacies of whatever Hanson is talking about.

"Sure," David says, when Hanson pauses to take in some more air, "but that wasn't the only proposed site, right? I'm not imagining that? I thought the whole point of that report was to give alternatives, so why does my briefing paper only mention the one that turned out to be unsuitable?"

Or maybe not so lost.

Marcus Hanson clicks his pen and directs a patient look at David. "I believe the brief in question was prepared by a senior member of Mr Wolfson's department."

He speaks with the calm voice of someone who knows that his job is the safest in the room. It takes more than a change of kings to unseat the Chancellor, the sole nod towards democracy in the inner echelons of Gilboa's government. _He_ was elected. He sits at the left hand of the monarch and—in theory at least—is the vox populi. For the moment, Hanson has taken the reins of the cabinet in hand, and although this is unlikely to be making him popular, it's close enough to his job description that nobody's dared to make more than a few passive-aggressive comments that appear to have flown over David's head.

Jack casts a glance over his shoulder to where his sister is sitting. He doesn't know what he expects—a fucking _glow_? Michelle has her chin in her hand and a smile on her face, and she's ignoring every other person in the seats. The audience area of the room's not full, but it's busy. A lot of people are nervous to see King David in action. Jack sees at least two familiar faces from CrossGen, and makes a note to look into what kind of scramblings for position are going on in William's company at the moment.

At the front of the room Neil Wolfson, Minister for Resources and Agriculture, is explaining to David, in tones that barely skate the edge of patronising, the process by which a senior member of his department summarised a three-hundred page report on clean energy options and possible locations for wind turbine farms.

"Can he write it again?" David cuts in. "Maybe a three-page summary instead of a one-page, this time? I know I've got a lot on my desk at the moment, but I promise I'll read it."

Someone moves into Jack's peripheral vision and takes a sudden seat by his side.

"Reverend," Jack says.

Reverend Samuels slowly unwraps a white scarf from his throat, then folds it into a square in his lap. He nods at Jack. It's as hard as ever to work out what his mood might be.

"A powerful sight," Samuels says, "that empty chair."

The Chancellor sits at the king's left hand. Perry sits behind him, and a little to the side; _writing_ history as it's being created, Jack thinks. The seat to the king's right hand is a traditional one, not always filled: that of trusted personal advisor. The post that David filled for Silas, for those brief months when Silas's fickle and paranoid affection allowed it. Samuels is right. Jack's eyes keep returning to that chair, the vacant reminder of David's loyalty. It's the only politically astute move he's seen David make so far. He wonders if it even was David who had the chair put there.

"It's making them nervous," Jack says, trying not to enjoy himself. "They're worried about their job security. Wouldn't you be?"

"Silas too was a soldier and then a king," Samuels says. "He gathered around himself people whose expertise matched the gaps in his own; the country would not have flourished as it has, otherwise."

"If you say so."

Samuels gives him a sharp look. "The king must learn to hold the country's reins before he can steer it without assistance. He is still a man, after all."

There's no point picking fights with God's voice. Nothing good ever comes of it.

"Believe me, Reverend," Jack says. "I'm in no danger of forgetting that."

The subject moves on from energy contracts to unemployment rates to the health budget to protests in the Southern Territories over housing prices. David is placatory and polite, deferring to opinions, inserting the occasional question that breaks the smooth flow of someone's speech like a frog rising from a pond. Jack begins to get a feel for what's happening beneath the nervousness; he can spot at least two people who are definitely on David's side, who risk their neutrality in defending him from verbal traps laid by others. Jack notes who sets the traps.

The Minister for Justice and Corrections brings to the cabinet's attention a statement from the Crown Attorney, currently out of town, advising that the investigation and trial around Silas's assassination should happen as soon as possible, while events are still fresh in memory. The Minister for Information—Caleb North, the smarmy wart who stepped into Jack's job—is nodding in agreement the whole way through.

"Your Majesty would of course be expected to nominate the judge to preside—"

"We will judge these cases ourself," David says. His voice cuts the air. "Unless anyone cares to doubt our ability to do so fairly."

Jack's posture is startled erect, and he closes his hands on the sides of his chair. _That's_ new. The royal plural bursting out through David's lips is jarring, after his subdued and conciliatory approach to the rest of the session.

All of David's ministers are staring at their king. After a moment, several pairs of eyes flick unerringly towards where Jack is seated. Jack meets them all in succession, pleased at this evidence in support of his earlier guesses. Neil Wolfson he even favours with a mirthless smile.

"Anyone?" pushes David.

Hanson clears his throat. "Not a bad idea, sir," he says cautiously. "The significance of the crime…"

"I wasn't thinking significant," David says. "I was thinking personal. I don't exactly want anyone to get ideas about pointing guns at _me_."

Jack covers his mouth firmly with one hand and does not, does _not_ laugh. The cabinet adopts various expressions of deep discomfort. David, eyebrows raised, looks like a man who has walked into a cocktail party five seconds after someone has let out a ripping fart, and is puzzled as to why nobody is speaking; Jack's almost certain he's doing it on purpose. Jack looks over his shoulder to see if Michelle is laughing too, but she's left her seat, and he can't see her now.

"Of course not, sir," says Michael Salem.

"All right. Thank you." David looks down at the folder in front of him, and then back up. "Does anyone mind if we break for lunch?"

"Interesting," says Samuels, softly. "Do you now fear more for yourself, Your Highness, or less?"

Jack exhales. His breath shakes, and not all of it is the laughter still in his windpipe.

"I'll get back to you on that," he says.

* * *

Andrew Cross doesn't accuse Jack of anything, when he stands up in court. He looks at Jack with those colourless animal eyes and refuses to implicate him with the same mild voice with which he refuses to implicate himself. His lawyer is a tired-looking woman, full of dogged determination. She speaks well.

This is the only time Jack's been happy about the existence of his pestilent cousin, because he knows full well if it wasn't Andrew standing up there being put on trial by default, the sole presumed conspirator left alive, it'd be Jack instead. William is dead and someone has to stand there to be spat on. A living example. People always want to see blood flow. As it is, no actual charges have been laid against Jack; he doesn't have to have a lawyer, doesn't _have_ to speak at all. He skates an uneasy line between witness and king's evidence, and the glances sent his way by the guards tell him that he's one pointed finger away from being taken into custody.

But he's sick of being unheard, he's sick to fucking death of feeling irrelevant, and he'll go down swinging if that's what it takes. He stands in front of a packed room, gazing at David and at the clear blue-grey sky behind David's head, and he describes in a level voice the meetings he had with his uncle.

"He said my father would fall with," Jack pauses, swallows; only half for effect. "With as much bloodshed as was required."

Murmurs like rumbling of the earth spread across the crowd.

David says, "Are you opposed to bloodshed, Major Benjamin?"

Jack inhales sharply. He remembers David pulling him off Belial, in a damp dark house in Gath, prying Jack's hands off the man's neck. Remembers the look on David's face the next day when he saved Jack's life, again, _again_ , by shooting the man.

His first thought is that someone's been training David, for him to wield the past with such dexterity. But Jack's family did that, all on their own. Took someone like David and forced him to play these games, even if he can't yet play them well enough.

Jack leans close to the microphone. "I'm a soldier, Captain Shepherd."

"You will address His Majesty—" Perry starts, bristling like an offended bird, but David raises a hand and Perry subsides.

Jack says, "Look. My father's lack of respect for me was pretty well known. Shouted in this very room, in fact. But he was my father, he was my _family_. I never wanted him dead."

Michelle is somewhere in the crowd. Jack has been carefully not allowing himself to look for her.

Reverend Samuels tells the court that he too listened to William because he believed Silas' time as king was at an end, that Silas had strayed from the path and failed to recognise that the time of a new king was dawning.

"It saddens me," Samuels says in his portentous voice, "that King Silas had to die for God's plan to prevail. That his hubris was so insurmountable. But at the time I was approached by William Cross, I did not believe that there was a plan involving assassination."

Jack settles into his own chair and turns a pen in his fingers, filled with a directionless anger and a rueful kind of admiration. Standing up and putting it on record that Silas had it coming: that takes balls of cast iron. But nobody is going to arrest Samuels, or to accuse him of falsehood. He's God's voice. A finger of flame would have to strike him down from the heavens before most of the people of Gilboa would turn against him.

David, too, occupies a strange plurality of roles in these proceedings. He bears witness and he makes the final judgement. Instead of taking the stand like everyone else he simply stands up in his chair, the focus of the room as he's been all along, and waits for silence to fall. A door opens and the crown of Gilboa is carried in on a pillow; David lifts it onto his own head with a self-consciousness that makes Jack breathe a little easier.

The King of Gilboa testifies to being abducted from prison, after being falsely accused of treason, and offered his freedom by William Cross in exchange for betraying King Silas. He testifies to Samuels' presence at this meeting. He speaks slowly.

"Everything fits with what you have heard here today," David says. "I am confident that the late William Cross, brother-in-law to King Silas, was the man solely responsible for instigating and ordering bodily harm against the king, that he tried to draw others into his deadly plot and in doing so overplayed his hand. He overestimated the willingness of good Gilboans to be party to the heinous and treacherous crime of regicide."

To Jack's ears this has the ring of rehearsal. The thought stirs uneasily within him that David might have made up his mind a long time ago—before claiming the judgement of this case as his prerogative—what the outcome would be.

Now, though, David's voice changes. Emotion starts to seep through it like ink through paper. Perry, always a weather gauge when it comes to the laying down of history and of omen, looks more alert. The movements of his pen have more purpose.

David says, "Jack Benjamin saved my life, when his father sentenced me to death. He spoke for me, in this very court. He gained nothing on the tragic day we are discussing, and lost more than can be measured by anyone who has not also lost a father." A pause. Everyone in the kingdom knows that David's father died in the war. "He was misled, and I hold him blameless."

David looks, finally, at Jack. Jack manages to nod and David nods back at him.

Misled. Better than complicit; better than _weak_.

"However," David goes on, "I cannot convince myself that Andrew Cross was unaware of his father's plan. And if he won't speak either for or against himself, I must find some kind of middle ground. My sentence is therefore to banish him from this kingdom, as he was once banished before."

Andrew's mouth moves. It looks almost like a smile. Jack forces his eyes away, a chill going down his spine. He focuses instead on the gladness rising in his throat, trying to relax into the weight that has just been lifted from his own shoulders.

David raises his voice and sweeps on, before the noise has died down, "I am aware of the great responsibility that a king bears, at a time like this. Life and death. Imprisonment and exile. But I hope, and I pray, that I never lose sight of the true meaning of justice. And to that end I today extend a full pardon to Her Majesty the Queen Mother, Rose Benjamin, for her actions on that day."

Pandemonium. Jack swallows hard, and watches David, whose gaze seeks out a place in the crowd; no need to guess now where Queen Michelle is to be found. David's eyes beneath the crown are dark and guileless and full of naked relief.

* * *

"Can I get another?" Jack says, waving the empty soda can as a guard walks past the open door to the living room. "Just—yell for someone. Thanks." He returns his attention to the laptop balanced on his chest, and gives a little toss of his hand that lands the empty can on a nearby low table.

The blog article he's reading is about him. Which in a previous life, months ago, he would have enjoyed—no matter how hysterically his behaviour was condemned, no matter how unflattering the photos, his family would always be able to have a laugh about it—but this is the new world, the new Jack Benjamin, the ex-heir whose father yelled _faggot_ in front of several cameras and hundreds of important ears. Hundreds of important eyes which saw Jack flinch in response.

He thinks for a brief moment about Nancy Pandanus. For all that the truth is useless and has reduced his name to rubble, Jack refuses to shove it back in its box.

This article purports to be an exposé on the now-accepted knowledge of Jack's ‘sordid ways', along with a variety of quotes from someone claiming to have seen him _rubbing himself against another man_ ; the source names a bar that Jack's only been inside twice, if that, and always with men from his unit. He never picked up there, and Joseph wouldn't have set foot in a place like that for half the kingdom. They're not even _good_ lies. And they're badly written. But Jack's stomach is full of something awful, like shrapnel rolling across tent canvas and leaving long rents in its wake. So far ginger beer hasn't managed to kill it, and Jack's on the verge of trying something stronger.

The blog is one of the many operated by UNN's online division. Fucking Caleb North. Jack wonders if it'd be worth owing Syene a favour to have him destroyed, quietly, or if Jack can be bothered to do it himself. Throwing a spanner into David's inherited cabinet would be a happy side effect, though God only knows who David would pick as a replacement. He might do something stupid, listen to the names murmured by the wrong people, and it'd be like driving a screwdriver into the side of his own leg. At least North seems happy to do the basics of his job and show David in a reasonably positive light; a Minister for Information with an agenda opposing the monarch's would be very, very bad news.

Jack's new soda arrives and he cracks it open, muttering a curse as a few sticky drops fall onto the keyboard. He transfers it to his other hand and clicks on another piece by the same blogger. A fluffy society thing, an art gallery opening for some young hotshot recently graduated from GAFA. Jack scrolls through the photographs of people who used to grab at his hands, laugh at his jokes, try to inveigle their way into his inner circle because it would, one day, be a _king_ 's inner circle. All of them are grinning and clutching drinks, their best angle turned to the camera.

Matthew Zakah is in one of the pictures. He has his arm around the shoulders of a blonde girl; Jack doesn't recognise either her face or her name, but he does recognise the tense angle of Matthew's shoulders, the too-tight curve of his fingers, dimpling the flesh of the girl's arm beneath the sequined black strap of her dress. Putting on a good show. Matthew, Matthew. At least he's kept his mouth shut—he could hardly do otherwise, could he?

Jack's tried going out again, though never with the same obliterative intent that he had the night before waking up to Nancy's voice. But he's still too knowable among young people, too infamous, and before he gets drunk enough that faces blur, he can see perfectly well that most of them are turning their backs on him. Girls know there's no use, now, and the boys who might previously have met his eyes in dark corners won't do it because they assume he'll drag them out into the muddy limelight with him. Even worse are the few new faces who've blatantly approached him like they're making a political statement.

Everyone wants something. Nobody's real, and Jack's no more real to them than he was when it was _his_ smile overcompensating on the society pages.

He touches with a fingertip the open collar of Matthew's shirt on the computer screen. Like a fist to the gut, he remembers the way Matthew's fingers had fumbled at Jack's shirt, the taste of his mouth and the ease with which Jack had managed to hook filthy requests out of it; his hands on Jack's hips and wrapped hard around Jack's cock.

Jack closes the laptop and shudders, stretching his legs out straight on the sofa. The only thing keeping him from going to his own room and jerking off furiously is, to be honest, pure spite. Fuck Matthew. Fuck all of them.

"Hey," says Michelle's voice. "I know you're hiding and I want to join in."

At sixteen weeks or thereabouts, his sister's belly is showing a curve. She's dressing so carefully that it's barely noticeable; the thought of it is still the perfect splash of water on Jack's angry libido. Michelle crosses the room and sits on the same long sofa, tucked into the opposite corner. She gives Jack one of her uncertain smiles.

"The doctor just visited. Everything's fine. He, she, was kicking, on the ultrasound."

"He or she?"

"They won't even try and guess for at least another month. And I don't care, you know, as long as…" Michelle swallows. She nudges Jack's foot with her knee. "Tell you a secret."

Jack folds his hands on the laptop and raises his eyebrows invitingly.

"I went to church a few days ago. I bought two votive candles and as I was lighting them I thought, one for a boy, one for a girl. God could send me a sign. Make one of them flicker, or go out, or something."

"Like a form on a website?" Jack drawls. "Check this box?"

"I know!" Michelle half-laughs. "Bothering God with trivialities. I thought I didn't care, and I _don't_ , but it seemed so important in that moment. Like I needed something to hold on to."

"Kicking on a scan."

"Yeah."

Their eyes meet comfortably. Jack allows himself a moment of feeling the mundane wonder of it, the fact that his sister is growing a person who will share his blood. And David's blood. Fuck, that's an odd thought.

"What happened to the candles?"

"Nothing. Nothing happened." Michelle checks her watch. "I've got a meeting in just under an hour with Peter Black. Do you think I could manage to vomit on him and blame morning sickness? I'm supposed to still be in the first trimester, after all."

"Isn't he almost seventy? Probably gets vomited on by grandkids all the time," Jack says. "I thought you two had a beautiful partnership, exploring new frontiers in health care, all that jazz."

"We would, except he refuses to be dragged into this century. He thinks all family doctors are still middle-aged men whose wives run their practice."

"Ours is," says Jack, to annoy her.

"Come on, Jack. You know what I mean. There are more women in the medical schools, healthcare's becoming more privatised, and there's a huge missing piece between those who can afford that kind of practitioner and those forced to go to the free clinics, which by the way have _never_ been funded appropriately for the burden placed on them."

"I think Black's loyal," Jack says, "if that helps."

Michelle snorts. "He's working hard. _And_ he called David a dense young whippersnapper, to my face."

Jack gives the closest thing to a real laugh he's had in weeks. He can hear Black's exact tone of voice. Michelle has a point: nobody working against David would be overheard saying anything like that, much less start grouching to the queen herself.

"We have to start at the ground," Michelle says, all earnestness. "Rehaul with a focus on solid community care and incentives for preventative health, to take the heat off the emergency rooms and prevent the hospital beds from being filled in the first place. A report came out two years ago from the Centre for Health Economics, and it's been…" She trails off, looking at Jack carefully. "I know, you don't care."

"Queening suits you, sis."

A flicker of darkness in her expression. Michelle lays her hand on her stomach. "It's only the same things I've always cared about. I don't need a throne to do them."

A bottle of alcohol really would be useful right now. Jack hasn't had a proper conversation with his sister, sober, for a long time. The longer this one goes on the more there's a sense that either of them will forget how to do it at any moment.

"And married life, how's that part suiting you?"

"Good," Michelle says. "It's great, it's—"

"You're allowed to bitch to me," Jack says into his drink can. " _I_ don't give a shit."

Michelle sinks further down with a small sigh. "It's not David," she says. "David's wonderful."

"Of course he is."

"It's—there's a big difference between dating someone in secret, the first person I'd _ever_ felt that way about, and…this. Married and pregnant and king and queen, I can't _breathe_ without anyone commenting on how I look and whether it's good for the baby and whether I'm a good role model and what David thinks. It'd be different if we ever spent time together as a proper couple when Dad—if we could have married without _any_ of this—God. Sometimes I wish we'd eloped to a different continent."

"You've been storing that one up," Jack says, when she subsides.

"I can't tell David, not right now. He'll just worry for me. And that's it, I feel like I'm part of the whole stupid parcel, part of what's making him unhappy—oh, I _know_ I'm not. But."

"At least there's no danger of me adding to the parcel," comes out of Jack.

Michelle frowns. "Is that what you think? He's worried you're avoiding him."

"Aw, he noticed," Jack says, fixing a fake smile to his face. "Our glorious young sovereign hasn't exactly been seeking me out either, has he?"

"That's not fair," Michelle says. "You know how busy he is."

"Then I'm not wasting his time."

"Jack—"

"Leave it, Michelle." Jack covers his eyes with the heels of his hands.

"Michelle, I thought you—Jack. Oh."

The new invader of Jack's sulking fit is Lucinda, click-clicking and with hair swept up, a leather folder in her arms. She pauses a little way inside the door.

A phone rings into the awkwardness. Michelle digs it out of a pocket in her dress and makes a face at the screen, but stands up. "I have to take this, I won't be long. You two will be—" Michelle's eyes dart between Lucinda and Jack, and she visibly fails to muster up the word _fine_. She simply nods apologetically and walks to the other end of the room, already lifting the phone to her ear.

"You can sit down," Jack says. He pushes his laptop aside and sits up properly, trying to keep his reflexive irritation out of his voice. "You're still working for my sister, then."

At first, Jack was convinced Michelle just didn't want to see Lucinda made a figure of ridicule, employing her as some nebulous mixture of PA and advisor, but the two of them seem to be growing closer. Neither of the Benjamin twins have ever been very good at real friends, and Michelle's never had the military's false-family structure to fall back on. Jack supposes it's nice for her, to have a girl friend. But she's clearly not venting about David to Lucinda, either.

"Yes. I think it's going well," Lucinda says. She sits down on a different chair. Her hands grip the edge of the seat as though it could turn into a rollercoaster. "It's very different to—well, anything." A ghost of self-deprecation. "I've actually never had a proper job before."

"Never needed one, right?"

She nods. "And now, I do need one. So it's all worked out."

Jack's known enough rich kids to read between the lines there, and what he reads makes him sit almost as upright as Lucinda. His irritation becomes an abrupt surge of anger on her behalf. Lucinda Wolfson and her failure to land the Prince of Gilboa. This is what Jack might have worried about, if he'd cared enough to worry.

"They seriously disowned you?" Jack says. "I'm not even the heir any more."

She shrugs. "My parents were loyal to Silas, and they're loyal to you. They think you should be king. And that I should have stood by you."

"You didn't tell them—"

A bit of a smile curls her mouth. She has full lips, neatly plum-painted with lipstick. She has huge eyes and thick hair. She's a gorgeous woman. If only Jack were able to assemble the jigsaw puzzle of her parts into something that he felt even the slightest bit of attraction for.

She says, "I didn't think it was my secret to tell."

Secret. The word thrums unpleasantly under Jack's ribs.

"It kind of is," Jack says. "They should at least know it wasn't anything you did. Or didn't do."

"They'll get over it eventually. Right now they're focusing on my sister; her boss was just named the new CEO of CrossGen."

"Fuck, Shiloh's an incestuous town," Jack mutters. "I missed that—who got it? I thought the board of directors was still busy stabbing one another in the back."

Lucinda says, with deliberation, "Median Lee, forty-nine, was recently named Chief Executive Officer of CrossGen Corporation, stepping into the leadership void left by the death of William Cross. Lee commenced as Chief Executive Energy at CrossGen Corporation two years ago, after a four-year stint as President of Marketing and Supply at Pella Industries."

Jack blinks at her.

"It was in the newspaper," Lucinda says. She pushes back some hair that doesn't need pushing back, a self-conscious motion. "I like newspapers. I mean, I read them all."

"I hope you don't take them all as gospel," Jack says dryly. "Wait, you memorised a random paragraph from the business pages?"

Lucinda blinks. "Not deliberately. It's just something I can do."

"You must have killed it at school."

"I did," she agrees. "Art history. Honours."

"Huh. I didn't know that."

"Maybe you would have known," she says, eyes lowered, "if you'd ever bothered to learn anything about me."

A pause. "Lucinda," Jack says. He can hear his own impressed smile.

Her eyes dart up, flashing like coins, and she's smiling too.

* * *

"She would have been a loyal wife to you," says Michelle later, when Jack tells her about that conversation.

"Yeah," Jack says. "That seems to be the consensus, doesn't it?"

"She has a great gift for loyalty," Michelle says softly.

Jack says, "Then I'm glad she's found somewhere more deserving to place it."

* * *

Jack stands in front of the mirror, shirtless, doing up his belt. He knows Joseph is behind him, but he doesn't turn; he lets Joseph step close and wrap his arms around Jack's waist, resting his chin on Jack's shoulder. Joseph has just come from the bed, but he is already fully clothed, ready to leave. Their reflections gaze at one another. Jack smiles. His body is full of a warmth like the shy birth of summer.

"Hey," Joseph says softly. "Hey, babe, look at me. Is there something wrong with your mouth?"

Jack turns around in the circle of Joseph's arms. Joseph's hands are on his face, his cheeks; one of Joseph's thumbs slips into his mouth for a moment.

"Yeah, see," Joseph says. "It's loose. They all are."

Startled, Jack explores with his own tongue. Joseph is right. All of his lower teeth are loose, some on the verge of falling out; how has Jack not noticed before now? Jack knows, with gut-deep certainty, that his teeth are what give his jaw its shape. Once they have all fallen out he won't look like himself any more.

He forces a laugh. "You'll still love me, though, right? Not just a pretty face."

Joseph says, "Right," but he sounds weak. Joseph is looking away now, to the open window, as if considering it as an escape. They are high, high up in the building. If Joseph jumps he will break his neck, he will smash his skull against the pavement. How can he be considering it? Is that really better than being stuck here in this room, with Jack, who is crumbling apart tooth by tooth?

"Look at me," Jack says, suddenly desperate.

"It's hard," Joseph says. His calm lovely eyes are still gazing out the window. "You've never understood how hard it is."

"Fuck you, Joe," Jack says. " _Look at me."_

"Your Highness. Prince Jonathan." This voice is not Joseph's.

"Don't call me that," Jack says, stranded between islands of sleep and waking. There is a hot bunching in the centre of his face, and another at the base of his throat. Any moment now a line will connect these places and he will start to cry. His nose burns with it. "Don't—" he chokes.

A hand, warm and dry, rests on his shoulder. He focuses. He's lying with his arms tangled in the bedclothes. Joseph's face and Michelle's half-expected one are both banished, and Thomasina is crouched by his bed with her hair scraped back as severely as usual. She is wearing a dark coat. Jack's bedside lamp is on. Something about the deep still quality of the air and the sluggish ache of Jack's body, like he's fought his way through mud, tells him that it is long past midnight.

Almost as soon as it she's placed it there, Thomasina withdraws her hand.

"I'm awake," Jack says. The urge to sob is dissipating as the yellow light veils him in normalcy, leaving a scooped-out feeling in its place. "What?"

"Your Highness," she says. "I want you to come with me. Get dressed."

Jack climbs out of bed. He has never been able to put his finger on Thomasina's priorities. But he's too curious not to do as she says.

"Am I in danger?" he asks, pulling a hoodie over his head.

"No."

"Is someone else in danger?"

"The royal family is safe," Thomasina says, which is a quarter of an answer, if that.

Jack finishes dressing and follows her. The palace is dark and hushed. Guards are on duty, but nobody stops them, or questions them. Thomasina's route is tortuous, taking them through the cellars and around corners and through seeming dead-ends that refuse to die. They are in the bowels of the palace; Jack has never been here before in his life.

They pass one or two more guards whose eyes roll over Jack's face without overt expression. They halt, finally, outside a door. The corridor is poorly lit. Thomasina looks like a dense shadow, a ghost.

"What is this?" Jack says.

"Behind that door is a political prisoner."

Thomasina isn't looking at him. Jack's heart give a thump strong enough to shake away the last dust of sleep. He has the sudden, visceral image of himself opening the door, stepping inside. The door closing and locking. The hollow ring of it. And then footsteps, receding.

Thomasina says, as if dredging the name up from a well, "Vesper Abaddon."

"No," Jack says. "No."

Her eyes find his face at last. She has never joked with him; nor with anyone, as far as Jack knows. She's lied. He'd bet a lot on that. But never joked.

"How long..." Jack says, but he doesn't need an answer. Since unification. Since the King of Gideon was declared dead. Jack licks his lips. "Does the king know?" he asks. Not _David_ , not in a conversation like this one. _The king_.

"No."

"Is that a _not yet_?"

Thomasina doesn't answer. Jack paces in a tight circle as though walking around the idea, looking at it from all angles. _Vesper Abaddon_. What a stupid fucking thing to do. But he understands what might have prompted his father to do it.

"Why am I here?" is his next question.

Thomasina looks at the wall, above his shoulder. "Silas brought gifts," she says. "Sometimes."

"When he wanted something," Jack says. "I know my father's gifts."

"Yes," says Thomasina. From a deep pocket of her coat she draws out a bottle of wine.

Jack turns away from her, leans his forehead against the wall and breathes in the scent of stone. This is the kind of place that should smell ancient, damp, drenched in the misery of centuries. But Gilboa is a child, a kingdom not much older than Jack himself, and the city of Shiloh has barely taken its first breaths. It was just Silas who made it feel both old and inevitable.

"Thomasina," Jack says, turning around.

There are two pockets to Thomasina's coat, one on each side. She pulls her hand out of the second one, unhurried, and holds the gun out to Jack.

Jack looks from the gun to the wine to the gun again and then back at Thomasina, whose expression has changed only in that it's tighter, somehow, like stretched plastic.

"Is this a fucking _test_?" he says.

Only it wouldn't be David behind it, and it can't be Michelle, and although he wouldn't put it past his stunningly dangerous and loving mother to be pulling this kind of shit on him from afar, he doesn't think she knows about this either. If she'd known that Vesper Abaddon was still alive, she would have been down here a long time ago, doing what Jack has mostly made up his mind to do.

Thomasina again says nothing. But then, she wouldn't. Of all the people in the world who do the dirty and difficult things when they have to be done, Thomasina outshines Jack, outshines his mother, outshines them all. She's putting this one in his hands for a reason.

Jack takes the gun. She unlocks the door to the cell, and he steps inside.

* * *

The words _Port Prosperity_ are spoken just as Jack's eyes pass over them on the page, which startles him out of the flow of the paragraph. He looks up.

"—final withdrawal of troops stationed to assist in handover," Michael Salem, the Minister of Defence, is saying. He segues into an explanation of why said troops have been there two months longer than originally planned, and dances with as much delicacy as he can muster around the subsequent cost to the taxpayer.

Jack runs his finger down the centre of the pages, splaying them slightly more open, and returns his attention to the book. Nancy put this one in his hands the last time he was at the library, along with a lecture about the fact that she had a full schedule and could not, in fact, drop everything to entertain royalty whenever it felt like waltzing past her office, but if he was there then he might as well make himself useful and put the coffee on.

The book is one of the hundreds written about the War of Unification, focusing narrowly on the behind-the-scenes intelligence work of the war's first three years. It was written by an analyst, one of those anonymous and vitally necessary men whose dust jacket photo shows him to be mousy-looking and vague behind glasses, and it doesn't mention Jack's father anywhere in all of its three hundred pages. Jack, never much of a reader, is enjoying it a lot. He suspects he's the only person to have borrowed it in the history of its existence on the library shelves.

Jack has spent enough time watching parliamentary proceedings by now to know when he can tune out. He still spreads himself out over as many seats as possible, and there are plenty to go around. The initial wave of paranoia and curiosity has ebbed. The number of people in the audience, when David's cabinet meets to decide the small fates of Gilboa's citizens, is slowly settling down to the usual scattering of journalists and lobbyists and people whose reports are on the agenda.

"Not enough going on to hold your interest?"

Jack looks up to see Graham Weaver, who gestures at the book in Jack's lap.

"I'm here to petition for more public holidays," Jack says. "We don't get enough three-day weekends for my liking."

Weaver gives a smile like a placard raised at an auction. Up, down. A weak-chinned younger man lurks behind his shoulder and is not introduced.

"Your brother-in-law doesn't want you in one of those seats at the table?" Weaver says.

Jack doesn't allow his face to move much. "What makes you think I haven't turned him down?"

Weaver nods thoughtfully, as though that's enough of an answer, and Jack has a quick spike of regret that he didn't just keep his mouth shut instead of being flippant. He'd give anything for a clear mission. For terrain he has a chance of surveying. There are too many traps in the grass here, and springing them will hurt other people, not just himself.

The watery young man follows Weaver as he continues down the steps to take a seat. There's enough of a resemblance, in profile, for that to be the son. Trent? Timothy? Something like that. Jack might have even met him once or twice, but he's a lukewarm and forgettable personality.

Through the huge windows behind the cabinet table can be seen a bright, windy day. Flags and treetops ripple and rise, and clouds stretch like butter rations spread over one too many slices of bread, letting the sky glare through. Sunlight leaves a stripe like drought-stricken wheat in David's blond hair, mellowing to gold on either side.

David turns his glass of water in neat, silent circles as Salem makes his ponderous way through two pages' worth of dot points, giving every appearance of listening. Beneath the table his foot is tapping. A commanding officer would find an excuse to send him on a ten-mile run, Jack thinks; a friend would pick a fight and let him beat his knuckles to bloody satisfaction against a pair of pads. But nobody commands David now.

Instead David defers more often than not to his Chancellor, asking him about the feedback from the local councillors at the People's Gathering. There's the power of words again: not a court, or a parliament, but a _gathering_. You imagine men in skins sitting around a fire, or a group of grannies knitting over tea in a draughty community hall. Comfortable. Toothless.

"If we could turn our attention south," Sameen Gross says. The Minister for Foreign Affairs is a tall woman with a dark ponytail reaching the middle of her back and fatigued lines carved around her eyes. "Premier Eliade's planned visit to Shiloh has been postponed as he deals with some unrest in his own capital."

"Unrest," Hanson says. "You mean half the country wants him to call an election so they can give his job to Abel Russe."

Gross's mouth thins. "In terms of implications for the planned trade talks," she goes on, "there is still the possibility of a smaller delegation…"

Salem's sharp rodent eyes stay on David the whole time that Gross talks. Watching him for clues. Salem's not the only one, just the most hostile about it. Most of the curiosity in the room now belongs to the ministers themselves, who are beginning to relax into the realisation that David won't fire them at the drop of a hat, and are therefore trying to feel out what the hell kind of king the country's been stuck with for the next four or five decades—God willing, of course. God save the king.

David seems to be stymying them, as far as Jack can see, by showing as little personality as possible. Everything is safe. Everything is calm. Everything points to the need for a modest tax increase—oh, well, let's not. Let's wait and see.

You wouldn't guess he'd ever served in an active theatre of war, or shouted down Silas, or stared blue-eyed and bleak at Jack through the bars of a death row cell while putting his life and happiness on the line for a series of ludicrous abstract nouns like Honour and Patriotism. Jack wants to grab David by the shoulders and shake him until all that reluctance and complacency clatter to the ground like spare change.

Just as Gross's rundown of the situation in the Nebolean capital starts to get interesting, Salem cuts her off with a bland, "I think we'll leave the details of that one for the security council, Sameen, so as not to waste our esteemed colleagues' time. Unless His Majesty objects?"

"No, sure, that's fine," David says. "Livia, you've been very patient. Please."

Gross cedes the floor to the Minister for Education; she has a polite nod for David as she sits down, and a glance like she's trying to cultivate psychic warfare for Salem. In that moment, Jack agrees with her. He can't do this casual sitting-in act at security council meetings, much as he now wishes he could.

Generals. Abner was almost the downfall of Jack's father, and Russe is shaping up to be just as dangerous a thorn in Eliade's side. The book in Jack's hands is testament to the fact that the residents of their region, war-torn for most of living memory, have a weakness for military leadership. There's no reason to suspect that General Holland, the senior military attaché to the king, is anything but loyal. And the army still loves David.

For now, Jack thinks, glancing down at his book as a debate around private school subsidies erupts. David's as popular as he needs to be, for now. Whether he can do enough with that remains to be seen.

* * *

By the third item in the auction—a mixed dozen wines from some surgeon's hobby vineyard, which they'd probably be serving at this dinner if any of them were remotely drinkable—Jack's feeling ready to bid half his bank account on anything breakable. He could stand on the table and let the bottles fall to the ground, one by one. He can picture himself doing it so vividly that he misses the winning bid entirely, and only opens his eyes when the smattering of applause accompanies the case of wine back to the winner's table.

There's a stab of not-quite-pain in Jack's thigh. He looks at Michelle and sees a very quick glint of silver on whatever piece of cutlery she just used to poke him, before she pulls it back beneath the white napkin in her lap.

"What?" Jack says.

Michelle's eyes are molten and irritated. She looks a lot like their mother. It doesn't help Jack's mood.

"You didn't have to come," she says.

"What, turn down my _lovely_ invitation to the inaugural Queen's Charity Dinner?"

"Yes," she says. "If all you were going to do is let everyone see how little you care about something that actually matters to me."

"Well, it's not like David was organising anything I could publicly shun," Jack says. "This was my only option."

"That's not funny," Michelle says under her breath.

David himself has been planted at another table. Jack's eye picks him out of the crowd as easily as ever and then moves, in an assessing way that's now automatic, to make note of who else has managed to wrangle themselves into the king's company.

"Did you pick the seating for tonight?" he asks Michelle.

"Lucinda did," says Michelle shortly, and then turns a pale shoulder and strikes up bright, pointed conversation with the cancer-stricken teenager or whomever it is that's seated on her other side.

That lends a new knot of interest to the whole thing, but one that Jack forces his mind away from unpicking. He _doesn't_ care. It's none of his business. It's just that his brain's turning to stale bread, in this young court of a new sovereign: going mouldy with disuse, no matter how many books Nancy gives him to read and how many cabinet sessions he watches for the satisfaction of noting everything that David's doing wrong.

Right then a fuse inside Jack, of which he has been only dimly aware, flares up hot and blinding and awful in the death throes of its final inch. Jack's fingers shake. He picks up his wine glass and goes to take a drink, then makes a different decision. The image from earlier is back, of the wine bottles smashing open and bleeding their contents across the polished floor in front of these polished people and their polished talk, their showy charity, their good intentions and their pride and their hypocrisy and their fucking pretence at lives that mean anything.

Jack's sick of shoving his urges down. There are other things in this room that will break.

He pushes back his chair and uses it as a step. He hears Michelle's conversation trail off, hears the auctioneer's jocular boom, "—to dig deep once more, ladies and—my goodness," before the man falls silent as well.

Jack plants one of his expensive shoes in a floral arrangement, and the other in a small clear space of white tablecloth. He presses a single finger to his lips, admonishing, and then raises his glass in the universal symbol.

Around the room, there's a rippling of movement, expensive watches and diamond bracelets shining on wrists that reach, uncertainly, for their own glasses, even as Jack attracts contemptuous looks. Best not to deny a toast when it's about to be offered. That'd be _rude_.

"You make me sick," Jack says clearly, and throws his glass to the ground.

And it is a throw, not just a drop. He aims well and with violence. Fragments of glass dart furiously in all directions, exploding from the centre, escaping the puddle of liquid which is too thin to be mistaken for blood.

"Jack," Michelle snaps.

The pure fury in her voice makes Jack feel exultant. "Can't hide that under a white napkin, sis," he crows. "Good. Let's do it. Let's bring it all out into the open. Who wants to go first?"

"You're an embarrassment," Michelle says, and then another voice says—

" _Jack_."

The silence in the room changes like a wire pulled tight between fists. And yes, _yes_ , David's on his feet. David drawn up with his soldier's posture, shoulders slammed back, erect with anger. Glorious.

"Come on," Jack urges him, tasting the hot acid of his words as he lets them tumble filterless from his mouth. He throws his arms wide. "March forward, let's see those stick-stiff limbs. Come forward. Come at me, Saint David, King David, chosen and perfect and fair."

He spits the adjectives out one by one. There's a man behind that story, Jack knows. Jack's _seen_ him. Jack helped him build the fucking story in the first place.

David says, "Get down."

Jack points right at David's beautiful face. "Now, _there_ ," he says, "you sounded like you might actually belong here."

Security guards are moving. Jack beats them to it, leaping forward and down, careful to avoid the wine. He feels and hears some minute glassy crunches beneath his feet. He shakes off the half-hearted attempts to grab his arms and escort him, and leaves them behind.

Whispers like snakes follow him out of the room.

Graham Weaver finds Jack sitting on the front steps of the convention centre, halfway between the street and the wary eyes of the guards on the door. Weaver is a large man, teetering on the boundary between well-built and fat, and his tailor does a good job of pushing him in the direction of the former. His hair is thick, though receding. Something about his face has always put Jack in mind of the dogs he used to see roaming the boundaries of army camps, quiet and intelligent and hungry.

Weaver sits heavily nearby, pulls a cigarette from a packet and then pauses. He holds the packet out to Jack. "Want one?"

Jack hasn't smoked in a long time but the irony of doing so outside Michelle's fucking health charity dinner is too much for him to resist. He accepts a cigarette, allowing Weaver to light it before he lifts it to his lips.

Jack waits. For all that they're in a public space, they're unlikely to be overheard. Two men in suits having escaped a dull party in order to smoke in peace. A tense, sickly suspicion is building in Jack's veins.

"I want to repeat what I said at the king and queen's wedding," Weaver says. "My offer of friendship."

"Yeah?" Jack looks right at him. "And what kind of friendship are you offering me, exactly?"

That cool canine gaze holds his. Weaver gives a short nod. "After your display tonight, it can hardly be considered a secret that you are no friend of David Shepherd," he says. "I sympathise with your…frustration. And there are others who share our feelings."

"Others," Jack says, neutral.

"Others who would stand behind a more suitable candidate," Weaver says quietly, "if he were willing to step forward."

Damn it, damn it, God _damn_ Silas for acting like he was immortal, and not setting the succession in stone. This is what Jack was trying to explain to David: it's not an open-and-shut blood dynasty then it's considered anybody's game to play. They were never going to move fast enough to avoid this kind of thing entirely, but Jack never expected it to declare itself so boldly to his face. To take the depths of his resentment for granted.

"And I'm sure these people would expect to be rewarded for their support, once this candidate had been crowned," Jack says.

Weaver's mouth moves in a feint towards self-deprecation. "We would expect no more than a seat at the table."

Like hell, Jack thinks. "Who's _we_?"

Weaver looks away, cagey. "Various interested parties."

"If I were interested…" Jack says, dry-mouthed. He can feel the future forking at his feet.

"There's a park in Northgate between the shopping centre and the train station. Small, but hard to miss." Weaver takes a deep drag of smoke, still gazing straight ahead, and looks back at Jack as he exhales. "I often go walking there on Tuesday afternoons. Around three o'clock."

"Sounds nice."

"Mm," Weaver says. "There's a floral clock. Very pretty if you like that kind of thing."

Jack's mouth has gone through dry and into ashy. He tosses his half-smoked cigarette to the ground and grinds it to dullness.

"You should probably go back inside, Your Highness," Weaver says, smiling. "I'm sure you owe your sister an apology for causing a scene. You don't want people to talk even more."

"What about you? You're missing all the fun."

Weaver shakes his cigarette pack. "Everyone's forgiven the occasional little vice," he says. His eyes don't leave Jack's.

Jack makes himself smirk back. It feels like the man's knowing gaze sticks to him, like grease on his skin, as he stands and heads back into the building.

* * *

The knock on Jack's bedroom door comes barely five minutes after he's closed it. He endured a frosty ride home in the car with Michelle, who stared out of the window, streetlights illuminating her thin lips and her worried brow in regular bursts. Jack still hasn't decided if he will break anything else tonight.

He opens the door. Perry is standing on the other side, looking as nonplussed as Jack feels. He clears his throat.

"His Majesty, um, requests that you attend him."

"What did you say?"

Perry, ever obedient: "His Majesty requests—"

" _Requests_ ," Jack says scornfully. His anger, which had begun to dull, roars back to life. Not Thomasina, but Perry. This royal demand—oh, it's not a request at all—will be not only spread, but recorded: that David is forcing Jack to choose between jumping to his tune, or turning an ambivalent reputation into an outright treasonous one.

A summoning to the king's presence. Silas used to do that.

"Yes," says Perry.

So Jack does what he did when it was his father, and manufactures a smile. "Well then," he drawls. "Let's not keep His Majesty waiting."

Perry deposits him at the main entrance to the king's official bedroom—which is, in archaic style, close to but not the same room as the queen's bedroom—where the guards at the door ignore Jack with professional alertness. Perry opens the door, announces Jack in an awkward voice, and then escapes with the expression of a man who wanted to be in his own bed two hours ago.

Jack stands in David's room, still half trussed up in black tie, and seethes. He considers the conversation he had with Weaver, holds it tucked against his chest like a heated stone— _I know something you don't_ —even though the memory of Weaver's voice saying _a little vice_ makes him want to kick a hole in the wall. How kind, how fucking _considerate_ , to suggest that Jack's distasteful habit of fucking other men wouldn't stand in the way of him being a suitable figurehead for Gilboa's treasonous power brokers.

"Jack," David says. The King of Gilboa is sitting on the very edge of an armchair, hands clasped between his knees. He looks as though he is bracing himself for something.

Jack snaps his heels together and gives a rigid, impeccable salute.

"Sir. You requested my presence."

A pause. David waves a hand that seems to encompass the rest of the furniture in the room. "Sit down, come on."

"Prefer to stand, sir."

David sighs. Looks at his hands, then back up at Jack. "Did you know there are secret passages in the palace?"

Whatever Jack expected David to say, that wasn't it. He wonders if this is code.

He says, blankly, "What?"

"No? There's one out of this room that opens out in a storeroom near the kitchen—I think they keep sporting equipment there, when it's the wrong season for the sport—and then keeps going down to the cellars. Then a tunnel going east."

"How do you know?" Jack asks, curiosity taking over everything else. Along with a baffling whirl of jealousy at the thought that Jack's father would have shared such a thing with David over his own children. "Who showed you?"

David's mouth curves; it's a look inviting Jack in on a joke, and Jack resists it. "I only found out the night I moved into these rooms. And who do you think?"

"Thomasina," Jack surmises, relaxing out of parade posture. He's not surprised, now that he thinks about it. Vesper Abaddon in his cell. Dark winding passages behind the walls. His father built this palace, and of course he built extra shadows into its fabric. He was a king with a lot of things to hide in them. "Okay, so you ordered me here after a long night of separating Gilboa's elite from their money in order to tell me about secret passageways."

"Not exactly," David says. "My mother told me once, if you want to apologise properly and you're not sure how, start with a secret. It gives the other person the power."

Jack recalls the exact silvery tone of the glass smashing on the floor, and the look on David's face as Jack leapt down from the table.

He says, finally, "You're apologising to _me_?"

"Jack, I know you're not happy," David says. "Yes. I'm sorry. I should have done something. I want to do something."

Jack remembers, with an inrushing of all his anger like the collapse of a dead star, that David doesn't do guile.

He says, "I don't need any favours from you."

"I did think about offering you a cabinet seat, but the only person who's told me they want out is Livia Grainger."

"And here I thought Grainger was one of your sure things," Jack says, trying not to react to the first half of the sentence.

"I think she wanted out before Silas died," David says. "She's sticking around for continuity's sake. I've told her I appreciate it, but she'll quit before the end of the year. It doesn't matter. I'm not about to inflict you on the nation's schoolteachers. Or vice versa."

Jack laughs, startled.

"I've thought about it," David says. "You can name your posting."

Jack's laugh shrivels like a leaf in fire. His heart pounds. "What?"

"Any one." David's looking at him steadily. "Anywhere you like. Even outside the capital—there's a special forces unit stationed at the river base south of Corinth for training. Or you could name a team to go with you, if you wanted."

Of course David knows the importance of having men who are yours. Jack misses his previous unit with an ache like a missing toe, sometimes, but he hasn't contacted them. Too chickenshit to push, to find out that he's lost their good regard as well.

The thought of it: to be back in the only place he's ever felt respected, felt like he belonged. If David's smart, he wants Jack close and visible, where he can be monitored. And yet, this. Jack cradles the impossibility of the offer, tight-chested with longing.

"You don't think the irony would kill us?" Jack says. "Me being a soldier again, and you on the throne?"

"We could exchange postcards," David says. " _Wish I was ther_ e."

Jack laughs, again, surprised by how easily it slips out through the path worn in his mouth by the previous laugh. "Why didn't I know you could be funny?" he demands.

"I haven't found a lot in Shiloh to be worth joking about," David says.

And then David waits. He doesn't withdraw the offer. He just looks at Jack, and waits. David means it. He would give Jack the one thing that Jack can imagine as bearable right now, no further questions asked, and he'd trust him to serve the country at a distance.

Of the two offers Jack's received tonight, this one is for a position ludicrously less powerful. It should feel less generous, less crammed full of recognition. It doesn't.

Jack crouches down and removes his shoes, one by one. He makes a beeline for the decanter and glasses he can see on a sideboard, and pours himself a small measure of something warmly and darkly amber. Then he goes to take that seat that David suggested, except he takes it on the bed.

He spends a while getting comfortable against the pillows, relishing the small discomfort conveyed by the angle of David's chin that this elicits. He takes a small, careful sip from the glass. Spiced vapours crawl deliriously down his throat and into the ceiling of his nose. He feels wide awake.

He says, "Do you know much about Graham Weaver?"

  


  


### DAVID

Since the day of his coronation David's been feeling like he has a handful of slippery fish. It's exhausting, trying to keep hold of them all at once, and he knows uneasily that he's been so busy focusing on the larger ones that he hasn't been paying enough attention to…well, anything else. It's consistent with the quality of David's life at the moment that it took Jack Benjamin standing on a table and throwing wine onto the floor for David to realise how much he wants Jack on his side, and how his own distraction and cowardice had almost lost him that chance.

No. Be honest. It's more than that.

It's that in the moment of the smash, David felt undeniable omen take hold of his bones; it's that Jack on the table, silhouetted against drapery and lights, was like an afterimage burned onto David's retinas. _Pay attention. This is important_. Nothing's felt that inexorable since the crown landed on his head and dug its sharp edges into his scalp. But omen doesn't come with instruction, David's learning, except in rare circumstances. God wants him to be king, and he's doing his best. God wants him to do… _what_ , for Jack?

The best David's managed to come up with is to gouge something out of himself, find the place where his selflessness is atrophying, and give Jack the thing that David himself thinks about in wistful, guilty moments. Jack was bang on when it comes to the irony of what David's forcing himself to offer.

He doesn't know if it will make Jack happy; he heard a scrap of hope in Jack's voice, so he hopes so, but he doesn't know how he'd spot happiness if it was there. Jack's never seemed very good at that emotion. Even now, leaning against the pillows and drinking the eight-year-old apple brandy that was a wedding present from the Premier of Gath, Jack looks halfway between sombre and blackly amused.

Jack says, "Do you know much about Graham Weaver?"

"The lobbyist? No, wait." David rubs at his forehead, struggling with the non sequitur. "Weaver Green. The developers."

"Yes and yes. He fancied himself a middleman for my father. And tonight he came up to me outside the dinner and told me that he's part of a shadowy group of people who will support a coup to kick you off the throne and put me on it."

David knows he lets the pause go on too long, but he can't help it. There seems like there should be another line. A punchline. Something.

"Shit," David says, and Jack gives a burst of laughter.

"Yeah. Shit. There: you can do whatever you want with that, though I warn you I haven't got any evidence. All he's got to do is deny it. You'd think," Jack adds, "that after one failed attempt, I'd be a less attractive puppet. I guess there's slim pickings, given you married the only other heir."

David would assume the whole thing to be a veiled threat except that Jack looks bemused at having spoken at all.

"Thank you," David says. It seems like the right thing to say.

"This is a secret," Jack says. A smile flashes out, mostly teeth. "I'm apologising."

"A group," David says. "Did he say who else?"

"No." Jack pauses. "But I'd put some money behind Lucinda's parents being involved. They're Benjamin loyalists, in a self-interested way, and Neil's had dealings with Weaver before. He's your Minister for Energy and Agriculture—the reason the wind turbine report got buried is because CrossGen is looking for an injection of public grant funding into their solar energy division, by the way."

"But why would they want me—" David stops, aware of how naïve he sounds.

Jack shrugs, watching him. "Weaver does business a certain way. Maybe he's written you off as too high-minded. Or else can't be bothered to start cultivating his channel to the throne all over again."

"Oh." David feels his cheeks heat with realisation. He _is_ naïve. He fucking hates these wrong-footed moments. "No. He did approach me, actually, not long after the coronation. I think he—I didn't realise it was an offer, at the time."

"See," Jack says, mocking. "Too high-minded."

David digs a finger into a familiar throb of tense pain at his temple. "I'm never going to be any good at this."

It's the first time he's put that fear out into the world so starkly. Jack won't be surprised to hear it. Jack probably agrees with him.

"Not with that attitude," Jack says. He takes another sip.

David, suspecting he'll need it, goes to pour himself a drink as well. He undoes his tie. He sits on the bed, legs stretched out. As beds go it's twice as large as anything David ever slept in before he moved into the palace; there's enough space for two more people between himself and Jack. He takes a slow drink of his own, staring at the expensive wallpaper which he chose because it reminds him of the pale blue paint in his mother's kitchen. He gathers his nerve into his mouth and speaks it.

"How, then?"

Another of those too-long pauses. Now Jack's the one waiting for the punchline.

"You're seriously asking _me_?" Jack says, when David fails to provide one.

"You've seen more of me in action than anyone but my ministers," David points out. "If you wanted me to fail, it'd be to step into the job yourself—in which case you'd have kept the conversation with Weaver to yourself—or out of spite. And I don't think you want to watch me bring Gilboa crashing down out of sheer incompetence. Not after how hard you shoved me onto the throne in the name of keeping the peace."

That all sounds logical to David. There's an odd expression on Jack's face that suggests David's missed some fundamental point, some loophole of motivation.

"And hey," David adds, "I don't think you're going to pull your punches to spare my feelings."

Jack raises his eyebrows, gives an agreeing kind of head-tilt, and drinks. After a moment he says, "Raise taxes. Raise land rates. Stop fucking around and dithering about it."

It is, actually, not unlike being punched. But David's never been one to fall down easily.

"This may sound weird," he says dryly, "but I'd like to stretch out my grace period for as long as possible. I'm going to have to do unpopular things eventually. I'd rather not use them to set the tone for my," and this word always tastes bizarre in his mouth, "reign."

"You're looking at it the wrong way round," says Jack. "Keep the good things in reserve. Set a tone, and make it a severe one. Then people will be grateful for favours, when they come; it'll be better in the long run than if you set yourself up as Generous King David, and then are forced to make cuts. You've got a grace period? Great. Use your popularity to do unpopular things _now_."

Something vague that Peter Black said, in passing, now falls into clarity in David's mind. If only more people would talk to him in straight lines; there's too much going on in David's life and David's head for him to appreciate subtle nudges at the moment. Too many fish in his hands. He knows there are probably hundreds of things like Weaver's overture passing over his comprehension in the conversations he's having every day, and he hates it. Jack's bored, critical voice is like fresh water after a long night of wine.

"Such as what?" David says.

"You should have given Andrew the death penalty."

"Your cousin—"

"You don't know him," Jack says flatly. "Yes, my fucking cousin."

"I've been in front of a firing squad," David says. "No."

"So you're never going to kill anyone?"

"Would that be such a bad thing?"

Jack chews his lip for a moment, contempt curling the skin near his nose. David feels provincial, and annoyed. Jack says, "Who killed more people in the war, the generals, or the men on the ground?"

David sees his point, but doesn't agree with all of it. "We're not at war any more, Jack."

"Health bills, then. Welfare policies. You're king; you're going to kill people. It doesn't have to be by signing your name to an execution order, but sometimes that's the quickest and most merciful way to do it. Or else pick up a gun and do it yourself."

David takes a couple of breaths, absorbing that one. He is beginning to feel battered. But he doesn't know how long this mood of Jack's, this tentative and cynical counsel, will last; he wants to snatch up everything he can.

"Any more pointers?"

"Yeah," Jack says. "Stop resenting the system of government. You can't change it, not right now. We _need_ the continuity, and anything you do will undermine your own power at a time when you're supposed to be consolidating it. If you feel like you have to do something, change the people."

"What, you think I should fire my cabinet and hire a whole new one?"

"For a start," Jack says.

David shakes his head with a soft snort of laughter. "Michelle said something like that."

"Then you should be having conversations like this with her," says Jack, who doesn't look surprised. " _Use_ her. She's a politician too."

"She isn't."

"She is," says Jack. "Some things you just pick up from blood and exposure."

"Like radiation sickness," David says, bitter.

A crooked smile crosses Jack's face. "Yeah."

David sighs. Tiredness settles in his shoulders. He should ask Jack to leave. He should sleep. The juggling act of his life starts again in too few hours.

"You're not incompetent," Jack says abruptly. "But I seriously can't believe I ever convinced anyone you were a spy."

"Me neither," David says. "If I was one, I was doing a terrible job of it, stumbling around in the public eye like that."

Jack makes a dismissive motion with his hand. "That wouldn't have mattered. There are two kinds of good intelligence agents: the ones that nobody knows, and the ones who are so well known to be one thing that nobody notices them being another."

"I don't know _what_ I was doing back then," David says, feeling the truth sting like pus leaving a wound. "It all felt like an enormous mistake. It still does sometimes."

"God doesn't make mistakes," Jack says, flicking David's bitterness back at him. "And you were a gift from God for the house of Benjamin. For my father, my sister. He gave you to them. What, what's so amusing?"

"He gave me to you first, Jack. I know you were unconscious at the time, but I'd have thought you'd remember that."

"Are you saying I've got the prior claim?"

"I'm saying…an argument could be made."

"Yeah, I know how you love an argument, Shepherd."

David laughs. "No, you're thinking of Michelle."

"Right." Jack's whole manner is different, when he lets laughter stick to him for more than a breath.

"I won't take back the job offer. Anywhere. It's yours if you want it."

"You don't want me to want it," Jack says.

David winces. "Jack—"

"What do you want from me?"

David has his mouth poised around a lie that's not really a lie: _I want you to do whatever makes you happy. Whatever will remove this shadow from your voice._ But into his mind comes a memory of his own attempts to leave Shiloh, back at the beginning of all of this, and the messages that crawled out of the environment to batter at him. He feels a nudge like a thumb pressed down on his soul.

"Don't go," he says, instead.

"Stay here? And do what?"

Frustrated: "I don't know."

Jack gazes at him for a long time. David has always been helpless in the face of beauty, stunned by it, feeling it like an open palm slammed down onto his sternum. Jack's fingers are still and the light catches his eyes like flooded foxholes on a battleground. He's beautiful like Michelle by firelight was beautiful, like Shiloh's streets and high spaces are beautiful. David inhales past the sudden weight of it.

"Actually," Jack says. "I think we can do better than the army."

"I do need ministers," David says. "According to you. Are you volunteering?"

"I think you need a friend."

"You don't think I need a few friends?"

Jack looks at him sharply. "No, I think one's enough. If it's the right one."

David smiles. "And that's you."

"I told you," Jack says. "There are two kinds of good intelligence agents. And I am _very_ good."

For once, there's barely any arrogance to it. Jack sounds bitter again. David forces himself to consider Jack as a constellation of credentials. He was the military's first choice to lead stealth missions, and both soldier gossip and David's uneasy experience tell him that Jack knows everything there is to know about getting information out of people and using it. He was the Ministry of Information, for a short while, in the ways that mattered.

And, David thinks with a jolt of pain, Jack brings to the table half a lifetime's worth of pretending to be something that he isn't. Denying the fundamental truth of himself while existing under the eyes of an entire country.

"You think we can turn it to our advantage," David says. "What people assume about you."

"What they assume about _us_ ," Jack agrees. "Weaver's a risk-taker, but he's not suicidal. He'd only have come to me if he was sure I hated you enough not to tell you about it, even if I didn't leap to sign on."

And Weaver was wrong. He was wrong about Jack, just like Silas was wrong, just like William Cross was wrong. It must be horrifyingly lonely to never be known.

"You're not actually talking about friendship," David says. It stings, a little. "You're talking about being an ace up my sleeve."

Jack sits up. He looks David right in the eye. Now that David has thought about Jack's attractiveness, he can't put the thought aside, and probably will never be able to discard it completely. It feels like a gate set swinging and now come to a half-open rest.

Jack says, with that familiar Benjamin scorn, "Shepherd, do you think either of us can afford anything as simple as _friendship_ right now?"

David looks right back at him and says, "Yes."

Jack blinks. It is a slow unbearable sweep of lashes. "The ace up your sleeve," he says finally. "The knife nobody knows about. That's what we've got. That's all I'm offering. Well?"

If put back in front of that firing squad and sworn to honesty, David wouldn't be able to say that he altogether trusts Jack. He's learned wariness from this city and this family. He remembers what happened when he trusted Silas. But he also remembers Jack with blood still fresh on his shirt, crafting in a broken voice the story of David's accession, preserving the singularity of the sovereign—and David trusts him exactly enough to say, again:

"Yes."

* * *

A building with secret passages is made to hold secrets. David wonders if it breeds them, somehow, if the very existence of these closed-off spaces causes intrigue to precipitate in the darkness like crystals in water. It's shockingly easy to set up regular meetings, hidden away from everyone: from David's security, from Perry, from Thomasina. Not that David would bet his life on Thomasina's ignorance, in this or in anything, but she never gives a sign.

Jack enters the secret passage in the storeroom, and climbs the narrow stairs to David's room with a tiny flashlight; he knocks against the false panel and waits for David to open it. More often than not he brings drinks with him, because a steady drop in the level of David's decanters is going to do nothing more than stir up worry and gossip about the king's burgeoning alcoholism. They agree on the date of the next meeting before they leave, and have a signal to cancel or to arrange extra ones in case of emergency.

"My chief of intelligence actually congratulated me on my foresight, in refusing to let you leave the city," David says. "What did he mean by that?"

"I had to come up with something that happened when you summoned me to your room," Jack says, "given Perry brought me here and your guards saw me leave. I made sure I kicked a wall on the way out," he adds, with satisfaction. "And then I called up some old soldier buddies of mine and took them out for drinks, and two beers in I started complaining to them about how I lowered myself to actually _ask_ you for a posting outside the capital, and you flat-out told me no."

"Carmichael thinks I'm keeping you close by to keep an eye on you," David realises. "Because I don't trust you not to go and quietly split my army and gather it under your own banner, halfway across the country."

"I sure hope so," Jack drawls. "That's the rumour I planted."

David opens his mouth, then closes it, on asking Jack whether the men he took drinking—perhaps the men he might have picked as his own unit, if he'd taken the job he wanted instead of staying at David's word—said anything about whether they'd sign up under such a banner. Major Jack Benjamin was always popular in the Gilboan army, and not all of that popularity would have been obliterated by any revelations about Jack's personal life. Not for the first time David reflects that they're going to be walking a dangerous edge, here, by selling Jack as the opposition.

"People who trust you," David realises, catching himself on the hidden barbs of this conversation. "I'm sorry. That you had to do that."

"Don't be. Can't be helped," Jack says. His shrug is a bit too casual to be casual. David doesn't push.

"You're still thinking this week, to meet with Weaver?"

Jack nods. "He's playing it like a courtship, and I'm playing back. It's more realistic for me to be skittish than eager. To feel the situation out before I commit myself to anything."

"Once burned," David says.

"Yeah."

"Kick me if this is a naïve farm boy suggestion," David says, "but what's to stop you from recording him? If all we need is evidence of a plot to take him down…"

Jack, sitting crosslegged near the end of the bed in jeans and a soft-looking red top, begins to straighten one leg deliberately in David's direction.

"All right!" David says. "Tell me why not."

"Taking out one member of a group, even if we're pretty sure he's the ringleader, doesn't necessarily kill the group. And it burns me for good. The thing about aces up sleeves is that there's only so many times you can spring an unexpected ace before someone calls foul. We'll only get to use this trick once, so we'd better make it count."

"You've got a plan."

"Not yet," Jack says. "But I think we'll get more out of this the longer I string it along."

"Just as long as you stop before the actual coup," David says dryly.

Jack tilts his head, raises his eyebrows, and softens his mouth into something angelic for all of two seconds before a sharp grin devours the illusion. "I'll do my best, _sir_. Now, as part of the digging around Weaver's going to expect me to do, I've made an excuse to meet with both of his kids this week. His wife died a few years back and the PI I hired doesn't think he's got a regular girlfriend, so the children are our best weak spot."

"You hired—all right."

"Due diligence. Though I'm not sure if he's smart enough to have done the same for me." This smile is humourless. "He's used to getting his way. He might not be paranoid enough. But it's not like they'd find much anyway. All _my_ skeletons are in their graves now."

David's been doing some due diligence of his own. "Julia and Tristan, then. I've met Julia; Michelle doesn't like her."

"Julia's the high achiever. Loves her father. But also, honestly, hates his breathing guts." Jack gives a hiccup of an expression in response to David's surprise. "Believe me. Takes one to know one."

"But Tristan's the one everyone expects to step into his shoes at Weaver Green, eventually."

"Father-son inheritance: it's a bitch. Especially when genetics won't give you the son you want, right?" Jack says.

"You'd think—" Jack's tone lands in David's stomach, via his ears, and David stops. He wishes Jack would stop doing that, opening scabs so that David can watch him bleed and be helpless to do anything. It makes David angry enough that he tells the truth. "I don't know what you expect me to say, when you say things like that."

Jack laughs and looks at the bedspread. "Me neither. Fuck. Let's—Tristan. The one whose eyes look like eggs that haven't been poached for long enough. He's got all the character of a piece of damp string, but weakness is easier to use. And if you can make his failures his family's failures, in public, his father will at least make sure he tries."

Jack's skipped a step, and David opens his mouth to plaintively ask him to back up and explain things, when the meaning fits itself abruptly into his mind like a jigsaw piece rotated to fit its hole.

"Give him a job."

"Give him a ministry portfolio," Jack agrees. "One you don't mind letting teeter for a while. I don't know, make up a new one, if you have to."

David considers it. "The timing's going to look suspicious to Weaver senior."

Jack waves that off. "Obviously, you need to meet with the kid yourself. See some potential. Come up with an excuse. And if you reshuffle the whole cabinet, it might get lost in the noise."

David drags the second pillow behind his back so that he can slump back, defeated, with greater ease. He knew this was coming. He's still not looking forward to it. "Reshuffle," he says.

Jack smiles. "Go get yourself a pen and some paper, Your Majesty. You're going to fire some people."

* * *

"—any more? Sir?"

The words barely fight their way through the marsh of David's inattention, but the tone manages to penetrate. David looks up from the report he's reading. Across the table Michelle points with her fork, amused, to the server patiently waiting at David's shoulder.

"Yes. I mean, thank you, Maya, no. I'm done."

Maya slips his empty plate and cutlery away and David closes the sheaf of ring-bound pages with a soft thud. He'll have to pick it up again before bed, but his eyes are smarting, the sentences starting to crawl around one another like meaningless ants. He knows from experience that he reads twice as slowly and takes in half as much information, in the evenings.

"Interesting read?" Lucinda says, curling her mouth up.

"I almost guarantee it's less interesting than yours," David says. "What are you two working on, are you still gathering enough statistics to send my poor Minister for Health into an early grave?"

"We've moved onto arrangements for the Memorial Day breakfast," Michelle says, making a face. "Don't make that kind of guarantee without checking first."

Today Michelle's afternoon meeting quietly and absently transformed into a dinner meeting. David doesn't mind; Lucinda's easy company, and it's nice to have someone else seated with them in the small dining area off the kitchen, reserved for family meals only. And not even that, most of the time. Prince Jack doesn't dine with the king and queen. It's a piece of gossip old enough that the tabloids have bored of chewing it over, a crust gone soggy and tasteless, and spat it out in search of something new. David's sorry for Jack's isolation, but it's for the best. His own poker face is improving, but he can still feel his features settling into laugh lines, into relief, into curiosity, into a hundred welcome emotions, whenever he hears Jack's knock on the secret panel; he'd have to work hard to get through a public meal with Jack at his elbow and still maintain the tense truce that's supposed to exist between them at the moment.

David reaches across the table and pulls the pen from his wife's hand, then folds her fingers in his. She smiles at him, tired and real. There's a speck of something dark, balsamic from the salad perhaps, by the side of her mouth.

"I won't stay for dessert," Lucinda says. She stands, then leans down to brush one of those not-really-there kisses against Michelle's cheek. The curve of her mouth deepens as she meets David's eyes. "Thank you for dinner."

"See you tomorrow," Michelle says.

Lucinda's always seemed brittle to David, like a wind could fling her against a tree and break her. But she's weathered a few knocks since David's accession, and there's a stubbornness to her that pokes out in unexpected ways. She refused a room in the palace, even though they've got more than enough. She lives nearby; that's all David knows. She's acting, more and more, as Michelle's one-woman diary. She meets with their housekeeping staff, and keeps Michelle organised when it comes to balancing the Queen's Charity with Michelle's determined charge on the healthcare system, as well as all the ceremonial and symbolic duties, though Michelle's claiming pregnancy in order to bow out of as many of the latter as possible.

Sheer exposure to Jack's critiques and advice is increasing David's paranoia; it feels a lot like a knife taken to raw ginger, a rough layer of comfort peeled back to expose something sharp and sensitive. This freshly suspicious version of David has the thought that Lucinda Wolfson, daughter of Neil and Ann Wolfson, might not be the best person to allow into their lives. Not with this level of intimacy. But Michelle certainly trusts her and, oddly, Jack seems to as well.

"Don't forget, the morphology scan's tomorrow," Michelle says. "The sonographer's coming at eleven."

"I'll be there," David promises. "I'll have Thomasina pull me out of the Treasury meeting. I'm sure my head will be pounding by then anyway." He casts a glance at the dreaded report and thinks, longingly and vividly, of the days spent working in his mother's garden or fixing cars, eating a hearty dinner with the knowledge that he had nothing to do afterwards but watch TV with his brothers. Sometimes kingship seems like a never-ending university degree with daily quizzes and hundreds of tutors and no vacations, no end date in sight, no colourful hood at the end, just more reading and more work. And practical assignments that could kill hundreds of people; thanks for that, Jack.

"Isn't it a bit early for the next scan? I thought it was at—twenty-four? Or twenty?"

"Twenty," Michelle says.

"But you're…" David looks at her, can't help the appalling dip of his eyes to the edge of the table as though he's got any hope of working it out from the size of her belly, even if he could see it properly. Numbers are spiralling in his head but they're the wrong numbers, they're the numbers from the report that Eli Rowell expects him to have read and understood by tomorrow morning.

Michelle's brow furrows. Her shoulders move back a little, smoothing out her collarbones. Most of the time there's very little of Silas in her face, but right now David looks into her eyes and sees the flint.

" _Twenty_. And if anyone asks, sixteen."

"I'm sorry." Guilt surges. "I know I should be keeping track."

After a moment she squeezes his hand, forgiving, and then Maya arrives with dessert and they each take back their own hands in order to eat.

This is their married life, David thinks: the two of them trying to reach one another across a gap, not quite as in sync as they'd like to be, but striving anyway. Holding on tight. David would never have guessed that sleeping in separate rooms would save a marriage as young as theirs, but it's doing a good job of compensating for the fact that they never learned how to live together beforehand. David likes the fact that either or both of them can be alone when they want to be, and the nights they have together are sweeter for it. If either of them is too preoccupied, they're banished; if they find themselves snapping at one another, coming up against one another's unexpected edges, they can either work through it or agree to separate for the night, depending on how much energy they have left over from the day.

Dinners are difficult to coordinate for the king and queen of Gilboa, but David and Michelle have breakfast together, always, just as the Benjamins did. Sometimes David will run into Jack pouring juice or snatching a pastry from a basket on the table, and sometimes their eyes will meet. Even in their own home there is no such thing as real privacy, unless they are locked behind David's door.

Michelle eats her cake in silence—they've left the scoop of mousse off her plate, in what David assumes is one of those pregnancy-related food things—and when she's done she lifts her gaze to David's again.

"I wish this was easier," she says. "For both of us."

"I'm sorry," David says again.

"Don't be sorry." Michelle laughs, one of those short startling laughs that sometimes come out of Jack when the situation doesn't seem to call for it in the slightest. "It's my family's fault you're stuck with this job. That you came here in the first place."

"I'm glad I did," David says, absolutely sincere.

"So am I," Michelle says. She bites her lip. "Everything's new at the moment, David. It's—a lot. We just have to trust that we've got something real between us. That it will still be standing when we're through the worst of it."

"I don't know if it will get easier," David says.

"Anything does, with practice."

Michelle stands, comes around the table. David pushes out his chair so she can sit on his lap. He treasures the heaviness of her, the space she takes up. He puts his hand on her stomach, and Michelle puts her own arm around his neck, and David breathes. She's right. This is real. As long as they don't lose sight of that, they'll be okay.

"I had all these elaborate fantasies," Michelle says. "About what my life might have been like, if I wasn't a princess. During the war I thought, if I was a normal girl, I could enlist as a nurse. We might have met in a field hospital."

"I would have smelled like mud and two weeks without a shower," David says. " _Very_ attractive."

"Or I could have grown up in your town," Michelle says. "Been a skinny girl with falling-down socks, staring at you in the playground at school."

"You'd have gone away to the city for medical school," David says. "And come back again with an expensive car that kept breaking down."

"Oh, I'd have been making up excuses to hang around your garage. And eventually we'd have a house of our own, in the country." Fatigue is making lacework of the edges of her voice. "We'd help people. Grow vegetables."

"Have you ever watered a plant in your life?" David asks.

Michelle laughs, warm. "No."

Her heartbeat is a soft counterpoint to David's own, wrapped in his arms like this, but suddenly bumping against his palm is a single new beat. Michelle goes still. David does too.

"That was—was that—"

"Yes." Michelle's hand presses down hard on his, as though they can reach through cloth and skin and touch the child she's growing. A real child, with real legs, kicking.

"Hey," David says, soft. "Hey there, little one."

"Boy or girl?" Michelle says. "Take a guess."

"Based on a kick?" David says, teasing. "I feel like I'm letting myself in for trouble either way."

"They'll tell us during the scan tomorrow, if you want."

"Do you want?"

"Hmm." She loosens the pressure of her hand and rubs her finger over the back of David's. "I think Mom's dying to know. Say the word and she'll start buying up every online baby boutique in either the pink or blue half of the range."

David's learning—slowly, but surely—to read between the lines, with Benjamins. He kisses Michelle's hair.

"I like yellow," he says.

Michelle turns a bright smile down to him. That flint is still lurking somewhere behind it. "Me too," she says. "Let's be surprised."

* * *

"I can't believe we couldn't replace Caleb fucking North," Jack says.

"I did offer," David says mildly.

"No, it's no good. Keeping a neutral party's better than guessing and getting it wrong. There's no one suitable who's absolutely on your side."

David gives Jack a small smile and Jack gives a sardonic one in return, a brief exchange of acknowledgement. Jack would be perfect if he wasn't doing _this_ job, this nebulous and dangerous one, instead.

David says, "I'd be happy with someone who'll tell the truth."

"No," Jack says, like a displeased teacher. "Someone who'll tell _your_ truth."

"I hated that when it was me, Jack. I fucking hated being the face of Silas's kingdom, being told where to stand and having words put in my mouth."

"A face like yours, Shepherd, you've got to expect that kind of trouble."

David pauses. Then sweeps on, accepting Jack's small flirtation like the gift it is, a piece of Jack's own truth aired not-so-innocently in this room where the only reaction that matters is David's.

"I don't think that the Ministry of Information has to be a propaganda machine."

"Yes, it does. Surely you can at least see the necessity—"

"It doesn't matter," David says, in the end-of-discussion voice he's still learning how to deploy. "If there's no one else suitable."

Jack's lying on his stomach, propped up on forearms. He releases a long breath and lets his head hang for a moment. There's a slice of pale skin visible, the nape of his neck between his hair and the collar of his shirt. David catches himself, startled, and looks away.

"I don't like hiding this from Michelle," David says. "I don't see why she can't join us. It's not as though her being in my room could be considered suspicious."

Jack lifts his head, which is no better. His cheekbones are twin lines of contempt, and his eyes are the cool colour of trees reflected on rain-washed slate. He stares at David as though David has suggested they take out an ad in the newspaper proclaiming eternal friendship.

"She's my wife," David says, nettled by two separate kinds of guilt. "She's your sister. If there's anyone who deserves to know…"

"It's not about who _deserves_ anything. The dirty work never is. It's—look, you're still not paranoid enough. Not even Thomasina knows about these meetings. I'm a secret," Jack says, with enough irony in his voice that David wants to flinch. "A _state_ secret."

"I was hoping not to be the kind of king who has secrets," David says. He hears how ludicrous it sounds, but he can't help thinking about Silas's pilgrimage.

Jack rolls, sits up. He moves close to David, close enough to kiss or intimidate, and David's heart speeds up. There has to be a way to turn Jack down without hurting him. But the image in his mind now is Silas breaking earth on a farm, shoulders loose; Silas with his arms around Helen, an uncomplicated man finding joy in a place far removed from wife and throne and public eye, and for a mad moment David thinks—what if he _didn't_ turn Jack down?

"David, David." Jack reaches out and pats his jaw. "A king without secrets? There's no such thing."

* * *

David stands outside the side door to the court room, waiting for everyone else to take their places before he enters. It's been long enough since lunch that his stomach is gnawing at him.

"How much would I need to bribe you to leave my side and get me a burger from Harry's?" he asks his security team.

McKean smiles. "Sorry, sir. I'm still more scared of Thomasina than I am of you."

"And Captain Gerritz would treat us both to one of his disappointed looks." David sighs.

The door opens and Perry sticks his head through. "Time, Your Majesty."

This isn't even a proper session of parliament. It's a swearing-in of the revamped cabinet, a photo op, and a mingling session. David tries to keep his mind on the people whose hands he's shaking, instead of the prospect of canapés.

Jack made a good argument for keeping Neil Wolfson around—"Where you can see him."—and extended the argument to Dane Araluen, David's Minister for Transport. Araluen, they now know, is one of the other interested parties in Weaver's conspiracy. David's muscle of deception is building stamina, keeping his voice level and his gaze polite as he talks to these men.

David has a new Treasurer, has gotten rid of two positions entirely—folding their responsibilities into the portfolios of others—and has four new people donning four existing hats, including that of Education; he finally let Livia Grainger escape into retirement, to his regret and her great relief, in the upheaval.

He feels as though he knows them all inside-out, given the time he and Jack spent flicking through dossiers, arguing and considering and compromising. Most of them are Jack's suggestions, and they've worked hard to ensure that Jack's fingerprints weren't on the appointments, finding ways for David to meet them all and get them talking in their areas of expertise so that the offers could be extended beneath a veneer of plausibility. David's pleased with Celia Halphen, for all that his new Minister for Defence made him feel about fifteen years old throughout the conversation they had during intermission at the theatre; a conversation that caused David to miss most of the second act, in the end, but he can't regret it. Jack said of Halphen that she looks like a rural schoolteacher, acts like a last-century queen, and has a mind sharper than a box of needles. He was correct on all points.

"Paul," David says, as a camera flashes at him. He extends a hand to his new Minister for Science and Innovation, one of the hybrid portfolios. This one was easy. Paul Ash is a good friend of Michelle's—is in love with Michelle, actually; David does recognise the symptoms, after all—and if he wants to believe that Michelle was the one to whisper his name into David's ear, then that's all to the better.

"He'll work hard," Jack said, approvingly, when David first floated Ash as a prospect. "He'll be too guilty to do otherwise."

"Thanks for the opportunity, sir," Ash says. His handshake is brief and strong and there's nothing overtly hostile in his face. A potential friend, David thinks; someone with the energy for nation-building. But David's got to secure his position before he thinks too hard about that.

"Looking forward to working with you," David says, and moves on to pose for another photo between the two ministers of newly-created portfolios. The Minister for Rural Affairs is an ex-president of the Gilboan Farmers' Association, and looks frequently about herself with an air between suspicion and startlement, like she's accidentally found herself on the wrong side of a sporting match.

The Minister for Civil Welfare is Tristan Weaver. He keeps pulling at the knot of his tie with a crooked finger, as though afraid it will tighten without his permission. Close up, his eyes really do look like undercooked eggs. It takes him an embarrassing few seconds to realise that David is holding out his hand to shake, and another few seconds to fumble into a proper grip.

"Your Majesty," he says. His gaze widens on David's face, then gives a nervous twitch to the distance, as if awaiting instruction. David wouldn't be surprised to see Graham Weaver at the end of that gaze. "I have to tell you that I, that I, um—"

"You were surprised by the job offer," David says, smiling.

"Surprised doesn't—uh, I mean, Your Majesty. I was honoured," says Tristan Weaver, as if stepping along a beach strewn with stingers, "by your confidence in my…abilities." He swallows. His eyes flit again to the back of the room.

"I need some more young people around me," David says. As excuses go, at least it's true. David lowers his voice and leans a little closer. "You and Paul are lowering the average age of the government by a good decade. I can't thank you enough."

Tristan laughs like a faltering motor, delayed and spluttery and high. But in David's hand, his grip becomes firmer, and David thinks about Jack's brutal dismissal of this young man's character: weak, a pawn, a thing to leverage against his father. He wonders if anyone has ever given Tristan Weaver any real reason to believe that he could do anything. In the war, David saw stern-faced soldiers crack and weep after twenty minutes of mortar fire; he saw shaky pale rabbits of boys transform, firm up and do incredible things. You don't know, until the pressure is on.

"Looking forward to working with you," David says again, fatalistically hearing the meaning leach out of the words already. He repeats them as many times as necessary, and finally calls for everyone to take their seats. One more thing to do before they can all go and have something to eat and drink, and have three times as many pictures taken of them again. Lillian Syene and her troops are waiting in one of the reception rooms.

David's slowly getting used to giving speeches, but he's never been one for notes. He hated reading off a teleprompter; he doesn't plan on doing it any time soon. He takes a deep breath and searches the back corners of the room until he see's Jack's dark head, bent as usual over a book. In the anticipatory silence, Jack lifts his eyes for a brief moment.

"You know my style of things by now," David says. "I'll keep this short." A hum of laughter, settling the atmosphere, runs across the room. "Here is what I believe. A king is only as good as the people around him. And I want all of you sitting at this table to have the chance to do what I'm doing: to leave a legacy for your children, to _build_ something. I am entrusting you with pieces of my kingdom.

"When I was a boy, my parents liked to dig up parables to tell us, usually to show us why our behaviour was unacceptable, or why it was about to be so. Which is good, I think. That's what parables are for, to guide us in our lives, to give us lessons to consider before we make our choices. And I remember very clearly one about a father—yeah, it's always fathers," he says, letting a smile slip out and gathering energy from the smiles that are returned to him. "A man who was a father and also a farmer. And he was proud of what he'd grown, over the years, but one day he divided his land between his children and said: I trust you to do something new. Something that I might not have thought of, if I'd kept going the way I have always gone."

David looks to his left, and to his right.

"I want all of you to help me do the things I haven't thought of yet, to bring Gilboa into more greatness. I want your names to be known. Your deeds to be celebrated. Thank you, that's all."

David sits. His Chancellor catches his eye and says, with a gruffness that David's never heard in Hanson's voice before, "That was a good one. Sir."

David smiles back at him. He agrees. On one level he is offering glory, but with the subtext being: you are now responsible for this. Your name lives and dies with mine. This is the gift of history, and David's more aware of it every day. Every time he sees Perry in his peripheral vision, writing and writing, for good or for ill.

Graham Weaver is somewhere in this room. Does he realise that his son's fate has now been lashed to David's?

David's stomach growls. He claps the Chancellor on the arm. "Come on, let's eat."

* * *

There's a hook David hangs his thoughts on for later, during the day. At night when he's lying in bed, in the no man's land of unpredictable time between the click of the lamp and sleep, he unhooks them, one at a time. It's the only time he is absolutely sure of not being interrupted. Sometimes he'll write something down to act on the next day; sometimes he'll simply tease at a problem or an idea until he falls asleep.

Tonight he is wearily unhooking the problem of Memorial Day and how much he wants to invite his family to the palace for the ceremony. And, conversely, how much he wants to spend Memorial Day somewhere anonymous and hidden, or drinking in a dark pub, clinking a glass in silent memory of the men who never made it out the other side of the war. He might be able to do it, with a lot of logistical effort, but he can't pretend that his old comrades would be able to relax into the Memorial Day they want and deserve if they're roped into Drinks With The King. No matter how dark the pub.

David sighs and closes his eyes, turning towards the centre of the bed. Michelle is on the other side, tonight, and David gratefully inhales the smell of her hair. He moves closer and wraps his arm loosely around her. Michelle shifts in a way that tells him she's not asleep either, despite the slowness of her breathing, and she turns beneath his arm.

Halfway through this turn Michelle lets out an awful sound, a stifled shriek, and sits bolt upright with a hand shoved over her mouth. David follows her white-eyed stare, heart hammering, and struggles upright as well, fumbling to switch on the lamp. He opens his mouth to shout for their guards, but the air vanishes from his lungs as though something's struck his body hard and winded him.

Standing at the foot of the bed is a tall woman with brown hair and eyes that are unbroken orbs of black, like tar, or water at the bottom of a well.

The woman says, "That won't help you, King David," and David can breathe again. His throat is left with a tight-elastic feeling that suggests it could close up in an instant, if he has another try at yelling.

David takes hold of Michelle's wrist, equal measures of comfort for both of them, and stares. The woman's clothes look normal on first glance and subtly wrong on the second, as though she's a time-traveller whose research team has tried to recreate an outfit of this time period from description and sketches.

David doesn't think she's a time-traveller.

"I know you," Michelle says. Her voice is so thick it edges on hysterical. She takes fast breaths, three of them, and David feels the effort with which she is fighting her pulse, fighting her fear. "Why do I know you?"

"I've laid my hand on your head, Princess," the woman says. "You and I came so close to walking away from this realm together."

And suddenly she looks familiar, in all her sickening strangeness, to David as well. Half-awake frozen nights during the war, writing lists of the fallen with numb fingers. A swamping unease. Things seen and dismissed as the creations of an overtired, trauma-battered mind.

"What are you doing here?" David says. Dread with the paralysing force of ice water is lapping at him.

"Silas died because he broke a vow," says the Angel of Death.

"What?" says Michelle in a whisper.

"And you, Princess, have not yet been called to account for breaking yours."

" _No_ ," David says. He is nothing but denial in the body of a man. He throws back the covers and staggers, lightheaded and clumsy with the sudden change in position, but determined. He will do something, even if all he can do is get himself bodily between Michelle and what's come for her. Lifting hands to an angel: there's precedent for that, it's something people do, and God can throw all the crowns and thrones at David that He wishes, but He can't expect David to bow his head and submit to this.

Part of him is expecting a wraith, for the human form to be no more than illusion. His fists might go straight through. But no: the angel is real, the realest thing in the room, with her blackout eyes and her solid cold body like a planted oak, shaking David off with a contemptuous look. David might as well try to attack the sky.

"Be still," the angel says, irritated.

"David," Michelle says.

"Don't touch her," David says. "Don't you dare."

"Her life has already been bargained for once," says the Angel of Death. "You stand where you stand today because that bargain was not upheld. I would be wary, king of men, of making the same mistake."

"No!" Michelle is out of bed now too, and she joins David at the foot of it, glaring through the tears that stand in her eyes. Her hair tumbles down her back and her feet are bare and she's magnificent, David's pregnant wife. "It was my vow. My betrayal. Not his."

"You swore yourselves to one another in God's sight," says the angel. "Your husband has the right to help you pay the price, if he so wishes."

"Done," David says at once. Not knowing what else to do, he holds out his hand.

The angel looks amused. A shape glows in David's palm for a moment; David sees the light of it first, then feels the pain, but he's barely drawn breath to gasp before it vanishes again.

"Then you must decide between you," the angel says. "And you must be in agreement."

Michelle tears her horrified gaze away from David. One of the tears hovering at the brim of her eye loses the battle, as David watches, and spills down her cheek. Her chin is still firm. "What? What must we decide?"

"Punishment stems from action," the angel says. "There are always consequences, Princess. You will decide. Your life," and a sharp wave of the hand, like a crow's wing flapping into flight, "or the child's."

Michelle sits down hard on the edge of the bed. That icy dread closes over David's head, and he can't breathe again, but this time the angel didn't do anything to cause it except—

Except tell them the price of the happiness they snatched, defiant, in the face of family and ultimatums and lies and yes, even oaths. David has not forgotten, but he honestly thought they'd been forgiven. That they would be allowed this.

He waits for Michelle to speak. After a long time, when it seems like she won't, David sits beside her.

"Michelle," he says. "We can have other children."

She makes an agonised sound. "How do you know that? This one was a miracle, I was never meant to—of _course_ I was never meant to. Do you think I would be rewarded with another?"

"I wouldn't care," David says, aching, helpless. "Michelle—"

"No," she whispers. "I always wanted to be a mother, and this—this is what a mother does."

"You're not just a mother. You are a person—you're a _queen_ , Michelle, think of all the good you're doing. All the things you can still do, with the rest of your life."

"We can have another child? You can have another wife," Michelle says, Benjamin ruthless, and David's shaking his head before he's aware of the action.

"I don't want that. I don't."

They are staring across the abyss and there is no firm place on which they can meet. David is so, so frightened.

"David, you don't understand, I _can't_."

"Yes you can." David kneels down at her feet, takes both of her hands between his. His panic tastes foul. "Michelle, if you love me, you can do this. I know, I know it's awful, I know you want this more than anything, but you can't want to _die_. Stay, for me."

 _Don't go_. Again he feels that awful jolt, and has to resist the urge to look over his shoulder at God's messenger. He thinks of Jack, silent and thoughtful, reworking his ambition under David's eyes. He thinks: _God, my God, I am selfish. I know it. I don't deserve these people. But I can't do this without them._

Michelle looks down at him as though she's never seen him before.

"Don't ask this of me," she whispers.

David says, "Gilboa is asking," and hates himself for it.

He says, "I can't do this without you."

The flimsy dam of Michelle's tears breaks. She makes tiny wet sounds as she inhales, but that's all. She pulls her hands away from David's, cradles them in her lap, beneath the suddenly heartbreaking swell of her abdomen.

After a long, long moment, she closes her eyes and nods.

David's heart skewers itself, and he leans forward, unable to bear the thought of touching her stomach now, but needing to thank her. He wipes the beginnings of his own tears on Michelle's knee, covered as it is by her nightgown, and then he stands and sits next to her again.

"Then you have made your choice," says the Angel of Death.

Michelle nods. David takes Michelle's hand; her fingers are limp in his, as though all the spark of her nerves has washed out of the tips.

The angel says, "Was it difficult?"

" _Yes_ ," Michelle snarls, still weeping openly.

"Does your heart burn within your chest, for the loss of something so loved?"

"That's enough," David snaps. His voice cracks.

Michelle says, again, "Yes."

The angel spreads her hands. Her odd garment does not have seams, but it does have a useless line of buttons. They shine in the lamplight like drops of blood.

"Then we are paid," she says simply.

"Stop with the riddles," David says. Sorrow has exhausted him. "Please, just—tell us what you mean."

"God does not punish love," the angel says.

A whiplash of hope grabs David's spine. "But you said—"

"Silas broke a vow by striking with jealousy and hate, where the bargain called for compassion and humility."

"Then what," Michelle swallows, her fingers tightening in David's. She sounds as tired as he is, and bewildered. "What is my punishment, for breaking my vow?"

A smile like the scent of nerve gas spreads over the angel's face. She says, "The knowledge of what you would have chosen."

And then she disappears, and the room is left colder than it was.

* * *

The city of Etenna is built on either side of a river, and there are markers in the concrete walls of the riverbank to show how high the water rises every spring. There are plaques set along it, commemorating particularly high years when the waters spilled out and flooded the parks and squares and houses that nudge their toes right up against the river.

All of this David takes on faith, as told to him by the city's mayor, because when he visits Etenna the River Kerith is a raging mass of grey water, its banks and any plaques completely submerged. As they flew into the city the tops of cars were visible like coloured pieces on a game board, entire trees floating past them, along with the white Vs following in the wake of small boats with outboard motors.

"Three days and the rain barely let up once," the mayor tells David grimly. He's a small man, with darker skin even than Reverend Samuels and a long scar interrupting one grey-touched eyebrow.

They are visiting a community shelter. Or rather, a school gym which has been converted into a place to sleep hundreds of people. David feels self-conscious and useless as he walks up and down the rough aisles, followed by his security and a small pack of cameras and the occasional giggling or wide-eyed child.

"How many were displaced?" David asks.

Mayor Enright says, "Families have had to abandon nearly five hundred houses, on the last official count. We've had some already trying to go back in boats to retrieve possessions, but it'll take at least a week for the water levels to drop to the point where most of them can even get in and start to take stock of the damage."

"Assuming it doesn't rain again in the meantime," says Alicia. The mayor's daughter is a stern-faced teenager with hair in flat braids. She has yet to look at David with anything but sidelong wariness.

To their left, a large group of people have gathered in a ragged circle, hands clasped. A man with priest's insignia is raising his voice.

"—to God who sees all, who knows all, and to whom we send our plea that we may better understand His will in sending us this trial, or to understand the sins which it was sent to wash away. We give thanks for our lives, and the lives of our loved ones—"

A small, shivering dog gives a series of barks that drown the priest's diminishing voice as David's small entourage moves on, towards a table where volunteers are taking down names and serving tea and coffee from enormous silver urns.

"Is that what the people here think?" David says. Taking a gamble he directs the question towards Alicia. "That God is punishing Etenna for something?"

Alicia gives a very adolescent shrug. When David holds the silence, and her father gives her a prompting nudge, she says, "I guess so, sir. Or Etenna in Gilboa's place."

"Why?" David asks, but feels the beginnings of the answer in his stomach even before Alicia turns her dark eyes to him.

"A king was killed," she says. "God's chosen king. He would not let that go unpunished."

"Some would say he hasn't," says David gently. "The man who pulled the trigger and the man who planned it both died on that same day. And there was a trial."

Alicia says nothing, hunching her shoulders near her ears, and abandons them to stand behind one of the plastic tables, unpacking spoons and sugar packets and disposable cups.

David lets her go, and waves away the beginnings of Major Enright's apology. He understands that fear, that need for an explanation beyond chance or God's whimsical cruelty. David grew up on a farm outside a small town of farmers; a bad summer, a frost-heavy winter, could mean the difference between normal life and the threat of bankruptcy for some of their neighbours. The drive to find a _why_ was always strong.

"Your Majesty." Thomasina, coming up to him. "There's a car to take you and Mr Weaver to the hospital, when you're ready."

David turns around and looks at the press. He hates this feeling that no matter what he does, here, it will be interpreted as a publicity stunt. Certainly his very presence is being played as one, but that's unavoidable, and he prefers it to just staying in unflooded Shiloh and pretending that nothing unpleasant ever happens to his citizens. David can be of no _practical_ use here, as the King of Gilboa. All he can do is bear witness, unless he uses his own two hands.

"Thomasina," he says. "Could we just—could they stop, for a while?"

"Of course," Thomasina says. She moves towards the journalists with the calm face and inexorable stride of a woman whose orders are considered to be the king's orders, and quickly banishes the cameras and notebooks outside.

David takes a moment to imagine Jack's face at David's blatant throwing-away of perfectly good publicity. He smiles. He is very glad he managed to leave Lillian Syene back in Shiloh. Indeed, King David's first official trip out of the capital has been lightly staffed, and David feels guilty for how good it feels to be outside again, to be seeing new places and walking on the street instead of being ferried between the same ten rooms in the palace and Unity Tower. It feels like a holiday, and yet a city had to be flooded for him to have this.

David joins Alicia behind the table and starts arranging cookies on paper plates without looking at her, doing his best to appear unaware of her sharp glances and the space she puts between them, as if unsure of how close she's allowed to get. When David struggles to open a recalcitrant cookie wrapper without ripping the thing to pieces, she pulls a pair of scissors from a pocket of her apron and holds them out.

"Here, Your Majesty," she says.

"Thanks," David says, taking them.

When David looks up he catches Tristan Weaver, who has been sitting talking with some of the displaced families, gazing at him. A toddler with a shock of red hair and yet another dog are both trying, with equal squirmy determination, to climb into Tristan's lap. David grins at him and, after a moment, Tristan manages one of his uncertain smiles in return.

After another hour they're all driven to the hospital, where David submits to being photographed making silly faces at a small boy with a bright orange cast enveloping most of his left leg.

"How did you break it?" David asks him.

"Jumped off a fence," says the kid with aplomb.

"Ah," says David. "I got this jumping out of a tree, see?" and shows off the thin white line near his elbow.

"I hope Her Majesty is well," says one of the nurses later, shyly. "She must be almost in the third trimester now?"

"Twenty-six weeks," David says easily. Michelle is, in fact, two weeks into the third trimester, but David has the public timeline down pat by now. He still gets a tight flutter in his chest remembering the night of the angel's visit. And part of him is always expecting a phone call to say that something _has_ gone wrong, but apparently that's a normal part of being an expectant father.

From the hospital they're driven to the mayor's house, where they eat an incredible dinner and Alicia defrosts enough to talk to David about her high school soccer team and the trip they had to Shiloh for the national finals. Then on to what David assumes must be the best hotel in Etenna, where they hover in the grand lobby while someone collects their keycards from the concierge desk and David's security team exchange frowns with their hotel counterparts.

David looks around. Apart from the smartly-dressed staff, there are only a handful of people to be seen in the lobby and only a few more in the lounge area.

"Is this hotel fully booked?" he asks.

"I can find out," Thomasina says. "I would not think so, however."

David bites down on asking, _Can we—?_ because he hasn't hit a thing he can't do, yet, if he voices the desire to do it, and he's beginning to hear how many things he phrases as questions and how hesitant it makes him sound.

Instead he says, "Pay for every empty room, for the rest of the week. See that they're filled by families who've lost their houses. We're going back to the shelter."

It takes him a moment to process the look on Thomasina's face. He doesn't think he's seen her smile more than twice before.

"Yes, sir," she says.

The volunteers at the shelter look somewhere between harassed and proud, when the royal retinue reappears, but soon a family with a whimpering baby and a loudly complaining toddler have been offered a ride to the hotel in the car that was set aside for David's use, and David's retinue have been given camp beds and foam mats in a corner of the hall. The journalists are nowhere to be seen, but many phone cameras are pointed in their direction with varying degrees of surreptitiousness, so David gives up on the idea of this not being publicised. They can call it a stunt if they want.

He calls Michelle, sitting on the edge of a camp bed. The sound of her voice blocks out everything else, and David feels his shoulders begin to relax as she walks him through her day, the pineapple and bacon sandwich she began craving at three in the afternoon, and a few details of what the cabinet did in his absence. David tells her about the flooding, about the hospital, and dutifully passes on the good wishes of the entire nursing staff.

After an unusual pause Michelle says, "Maybe this isn't a good time, but—I'm still worried about Jack. I know you tried to talk to him."

"I'll try again," David says. "But I don't want to push him. He doesn't have to like me, you know."

"You don't know him," Michelle says. David bites his tongue. She goes on, "Ever since we were little he's had to be _doing_ something. He was always especially awful to me whenever someone let him get bored. I don't know what he's doing with his days, and…I don't know. I'm sorry. Maybe I'm fretting over nothing."

"I'll talk to him," David promises.

When Michelle's hung up, David turns his phone in his hands. He misses Jack with a sudden, unexpected stab of wistfulness. He hadn't realised how tightly-wound he was before Jack became his debriefing partner, how odd and off-balance he feels without their meetings.

He stands, suddenly restless, and goes to get two cups of cocoa from the man whose turn it is behind the food tables. This man insists on grabbing David's hands, causing McKean to rumble and shift behind David's shoulder, but it turns out to be an appreciative gesture.

"Bless you, Your Majesty," the man says. "God keep you in health."

David feels uncomfortable, but he's got enough sense to see that _his_ comfort is not what's important here. He nods, murmurs something, and takes his cocoa back to the corner. One of the cups he dangles in front of Tristan Weaver, who's sitting on his own narrow bed with a grey and white blanket draped over his shoulders. Even with the number of people in the hall, it's only just a comfortable temperature.

"Here," David says, and sits next to him. "I thought we could talk."

"Why did you bring me along, sir?" bursts out of Tristan.

"Civil welfare," David says, with a shrug. "I didn't think you'd have something like this come up so soon after I invented the role. But I haven't got a Minister for Weather, so in terms of company it was you or the Minister for Civil Infrastructure and Development, and Rachel's off opening a new highway somewhere."

"I do appreciate the opportunity, sir." There's not much colour in Tristan's tone, but his eyes dart back towards the nearest family.

David thinks about Silas, and about Tristan's father, who wants David gone because David won't play the game as men like Weaver think it ought to be played.

He says, "I wanted this to be its own ministry because I've been thinking a lot about our social security system, such as it is. I'm sure one of the senior public servants has placed a few enormous binders on your desk by now."

Tristan looks at his hands. "I haven't gotten my head around much of it, sir," he says miserably.

"Let's start simple," David says. He nods around the hall, at the mothers setting their children, at the young people laughing and bickering over a lively game of cards nearby. "Do you think these people should be housed and fed by the state, if they would otherwise be homeless?"

"Their insurance—"

"Forget their insurance."

Wrapped in a donated blanket, holding a cup full of watery cocoa, Tristan Weaver—millionaire son of a millionaire opportunist—swallows hard. "I guess," he says. "Yes."

"And the people whose jobs were in the flooded businesses, should they be able to access a basic unemployment income while the city rebuilds?"

"Yes," says Tristan, more firmly.

"All right," David says. He takes a sip of the cocoa. Sugar warms him all the way down. "Then let's start there."

* * *

Despite the uneasy parallels David once drew with Helen, Jack is the one person who never lets him forget that he is a king. Sometimes he can forget for a while, with Michelle, because she's good at it; she's spent so much of her life searching for a way to forget that she is a princess—and now, that she is a queen. They can pretend together, although it's harder and harder. They are no longer two people in an abandoned room, finding solace in one another by the light of a fire. For all that they try to be normal, they are living with the knowledge of their choices. The angel was right. It's a punishment.

Jack has never been normal and won't pretend that he is. And he won't let David pretend either.

"You are king until it's part of your skin," he says, swirling whisky in a glass, standing in the centre of the bedroom. He avoids the chairs and never makes it long on the bed without having to pace, as if he needs to spread his energy over as much of the space as possible. "You are king every minute of the day."

"That sounds like your father," David says, without thinking.

Jack looks up. His eyes are bulletproof glass.

"Sorry," David says.

"Fuck." Jack laughs. He takes another drink and walks another tight circle, drifting out of it to come close to where David is sitting on the edge of the bed. "No, you were right. It was my father. It was a thing he said. Only he was lying about it, I think, and you don't have to."

"Nobody can be only a king," David says. He's thinking about Michelle. You can't be only a father, only a mother, _only_ anything. Try to flatten yourself to a single dimension and all you'll do is suffocate.

"Not only," Jack says. He reaches out one hand and touches one of the buttons on David's shirt, very gently, like he might touch a flower petal or an insect on the verge of taking flight. "But always. _You're_ king all the way through."

Jack sounds bitter. He is a little flushed, and drunker, David realises, than either of them usually gets. You need sharp wits for the work they do. They can stretch a glass each over hours.

"Bad day?" David asks, on a hunch.

Jack takes his finger back and throws back the rest of the whisky with fatalistic speed. "God-fucking-awful. I almost punched Araluen in his smug pointy face. He's already halfway to making lists of the things he wants when I'm on the throne. He's like a kid milking a divorce for all the presents he can get."

"I called my mother again," David says. He doesn't mean to say it, it just flows out of him. "She hung up after two sentences."

His half-drunk glass is tugged out of his hands. Jack wordlessly tops it up from the bottle, and refills his own as well before handing David's drink back. Then he settles himself in his usual place, sitting up against the headboard on what David has never managed to tell him is _David's_ side of the bed.

"We're not getting anything done tonight," Jack says.

David considers this for all of two seconds before gulping the whisky down, feeling the muscles between his ribs tighten as the burn of it punches its way back over his tongue. He sits next to Jack. Jack has pulled up one knee so he can lean his chin on it. His hair is untidy. His rainy eyes are pensive enough to break David's heart.

"Go on then," Jack says. His voice is soft and burred. "I can just about handle your angst now."

"I keep inviting them to the palace," David says. "They—well, at least my mother answers the phone. My brothers haven't forgiven me yet."

"For what?"

"Port Prosperity. Eli." David hits his head once, twice, against the wall. Sometimes he feels like he might as well be on a different planet, he's so far from the brothers he grew up with. "Leaving in the first place. I don't know."

"Screw them," Jack says calmly.

David opens his mouth and closes it. He can't throw family in Jack's face. They both have dead fathers and far-off mothers; the only advantage Jack has is a sibling who'll still talk to him, and these days he barely even has that.

"All I want is to be able to give back to them," he says, hating the hurt-little-boy tone in his own voice. "Comfort, security—God knows they deserve it. I asked my mother what it was she wanted, what I could give her." He swallows. He wishes Jack had filled his glass to the fucking brim. "She said she wanted a son that she could recognise as her own. That she could be proud of."

Jack's laughing again, silently now, his face tipped against his knee. After a while he says, muffled, "How about that. My father didn't think I was fit for the throne; your family doesn't think the throne is fit for _you_."

"Maybe they're right."

"Bull _shit_ ," Jack says, like the crack of a bullet. "You were never going to end up anywhere else, David. God's hand would have dragged you here by the ankle eventually, even if you tore your fingernails off trying to grip the ground."

There's this about Jack: he talks about God in the terms that David can't yet dare himself to do, at least outside the darkest and most resentful corners of his mind. An organ-meat kind of language of faith, beating and bloodied and absolutely real.

"I thought I kept making mistakes," David says.

"You do." Jack manages to smile, but with half his mouth. "But you're improving."

"Some days," David says, tilting his head back again, "it is really, really fucking hard to tell."

Silence. Then Jack says, "Throw me any more power, Your Majesty, and I'll start to suspect you're angling for that coup after all."

David says, challenging, "Then throw some back."

Jack changes his posture, bending his knees in a lazy W that points towards David on the bed. He worries the glass in his hands, and David wonders for a moment what they'd do during these evenings if they didn't have anything to hold, no props or pens or ever-present tumblers; if there was nothing in their hands at all. David thinks about Jack's fingertip touching his shirt button, and a sensation like filtered lightning darts through him.

Jack says, very quietly, "Part of me knew that William was going to kill him. I sat in that limo and watched him smirk about my future and I didn't want to believe he would, that he _could_ , but—Silas would have done it himself, right? Without even blinking. And every time I tried to imagine my father stuck in a cell somewhere while I sat on the throne, it was—nothing. A blank. I couldn't see it."

And it would have to have been a cell. Silas wouldn't have given up his kingship for anything less. Not God, not David, not vows made in despair and regretted in sunlight. _He_ would have worn his fingers to raw stumps trying to hold on.

When you think the idea all the way through to the end, William Cross's act of regicide makes more sense than David is comfortable with.

David lets Jack's secret sit between them, appreciating the weight of it. Wondering if Jack looks lighter, for having shed it onto the pile, or if it's just David's imagination. He thinks about the Angel of Death; but that's Michelle's secret too, not just his.

"I was absolutely sure I was going to die," David says. "When I was standing in front of that Goliath."

"You know," Jack says, "this secret loses a hell of a lot of power for _me_ when it's about how you heroically rescued _me_."

"Shut up," David says, throwing him a grin. "You'd already been heroically rescued at this point. You were heroically bleeding from a head wound behind friendly lines."

Jack flips him off. "The Goliath should have blown your pretty head off," he says, grinning back. "All right. You thought you were going to die."

"And I didn't care." The pressure's gone out of the room. David can even feel the edge of that strange, huge momentum that he felt on the battlefield, as the far reaches of his body were being numbed by the night. He felt like floating away. He could have looked over his shoulder and seen a woman with eyes as black and round and enigmatic as the tank's barrel. "I would have stood there forever. I think I only starting running again because they missed, and it was like a voice was saying: don't be a fucking idiot."

"Not caring," Jack says. "Yeah. I've had whole weeks like that."

* * *

"Perry," David says. "Last raised?"

"Two months ago, sir," Perry says. "Your resolution was to increase troop numbers at two of the smaller postings near the border, and to commission a report from Ms Gross's department in regards to the likely form that any civil instability within Nebo itself might take."

Lucinda's memory is superb, but sometimes David thinks that Perry is in a class of his own. His notes can't be that well organised, or that thorough; he barely seems to glance at them before reeling off whatever detail David has asked for. It's not comfortable. Not every word out of David's mouth in a political setting is a stunning gem to be recorded for the ages. David would be happy for plenty of his more embarrassing cabinet sessions, security briefings, trade talks, and public speeches to be consigned to the thankful oblivion of the ages.

But that's not how the kingship of Gilboa works. At least, for the moment. And David's choosing his battles right now.

"What's changed?" David asks, spinning his chair a little to look at Sameen Gross.

After a pause, a careful, pleased look spreads over Gross's face. David's getting the impression that she and Carmichael had been trying to nudge this situation in front of Silas's nose for a while, but Silas was a hard man to direct. He set his own agendas. David knows that better than anyone.

"Their economy hasn't recovered from the dip it took after the drought, and Eliade's taken his eye off a couple of balls," Gross says. "The most important being the upper middle class. A lot of people see the Premier as trying to kick down the walls of their grain silos so that he can give it all away to the unemployed. My department's had some…personnel issues," Gross adds. "The report you asked for is still a week away from done, sir. But I can tell you what it's going to say. Russe would divide the military."

General Holland looks up from where he's been shuffling papers. "Yes. And Eliade's not a commander."

"And General Russe's not a politician," says David. "Why does his name keep popping up? What's his platform?"

"That's splitting hairs," says Celia Halphen. "He's _political_ , that's for sure."

"His platform boils down to pre-war values," says Carmichael. "Ironically enough."

"Bring back the good old days," David says. "Only, let me guess, they weren't so good."

"Not if you were living below the poverty line in Jekka, like four million Neboleans still are," says Gross. "Almost half a million of whom are internal economic refugees who had to abandon their farms and look for work in the cities. Mostly Potnyan."

David's temple flares with pain. But he does know this. The Potnyans are one of Nebo's older religious-ethnic groups, and a minority, especially in the capital.

"Eliade's trying to stop his people from starving," David says.

"The hungry ones aren't the ones with the loudest voices," says Carmichael. "Or the guns."

"What happens if we offer help?" David says.

"Eliade refuses," Gross says at once. "That'd be the nail in his coffin. He can't look weak. Nebo's always been proud of its independence."

"And if we offer it under the table?"

Carmichael's eyebrows shoot up. David enjoys the moment.

"Don't tell me there aren't channels," David says. "Sameen?"

His Minister for Foreign Affairs and his chief of intelligence exchange a look. Gross gives a so-so kind of head shake and says, "If we approach—"

"No, it might be easier—"

"Guys," David says, amused.

"I'll look into it," Carmichael says.

Jack, with his bewildering nose for gossip, declared a long time ago that these two are having an affair, and David refused to believe it. Now he's not so sure.

After the meeting the members of the security council file out and David leans back in his chair, treasuring the breathing space as the room empties. He gazes for a while at the map projected on the wall, and the still-strange curve of the thick line that represents the border between Gilboa and Gath, ducking down and around Port Prosperity before it rises north again. Thinner dotted lines demarcate the old territories of Selah, Gideon, and Carmel. Even twenty-something years after unification those lines are as hard to scrub from the official maps as from the memory of their people. Towns that haven't existed near a true border for all that time will still feel like border towns, when you walk through them. David's boots were the ones doing the walking, for a while.

"Sir," Thomasina says from the doorway.

"I know, I know," David says. "I'm late for—what am I late for, Thomasina?"

When he looks at her, Thomasina is almost smiling. She's been doing that, since Etenna.

"You're not," she says. "You have a free hour. Do you want to stay here?" She speaks as though she finds nothing ridiculous about the fact that David might want to skulk for an hour in an empty room, staring at a map. She'd have coffee and fruit brought in for David if he asked for it.

Part of him does want to stay, wants to keep raking his eyes over those solid lines and letting them dredge up memory. His mind's stuck on something. The memory cresting at the moment is the mission that he and Jack were sent on in Gath, when Premier Shaw and Silas used them both to bring down the insurgent Belial. A couple of celebrity Gilboan pawns solving a Gathian problem; David has an idea by now of how much coin that would have earned Silas, in the currency of diplomacy in a war-weary continent, and he wonders what Silas spent it on. Or if he was shoring it up for future use.

Silas, who ignored the simmering disaster of Nebo to the south in favour of picking endlessly at the north like a dog with a festering sore. Silas who left this pile of shit for David to deal with along with everything else.

David swallows down the wave of anger, and stands up. If he sat in this chair for another hour he might chase the nebulous idea in his mind to the ground, but he can't make himself do it.

"No, thanks," he says. "There's something else I'd like to do."

The first time David came to the palace, the sun was shining. If he closes his eyes he can still remember the liquid angle of it on the lid of the grand piano, as he stood uncomfortably in a doorway, searching for something other than the empty space of the reception hall, and found this small room with its lead-tessellated windows and its elaborate iron fire screen, and the portrait of Silas on the wall. And the piano. And Jack, after a moment, hungover and graceful and glued to his coffee mug.

David sits down, savouring the impossibility of leisure. He doesn't want to chase his thoughts away, but rather give them a space to step into, and music might do the trick.

He wonders if the piano's been tuned recently. Lucinda would know. The palace ran itself smoothly before David was installed as king, continues to run itself in his absence, and would probably do so even if he never set foot in it again. Having the piano tuned even though nobody is playing it is the kind of thing that would be part of that thoughtless, expensive clockwork.

The portrait of Silas is to his right. David runs his fingers over the white keys and is aware of it as any musician would be aware of any listener. The first intelligible words that Jack Benjamin spoke to David Shepherd: _That used to hang in my room. Kept me up at night._ David's fingers feel clumsy. He can't even imagine it. The literal gaze of expectation, the grandeur of station. It'd fuck anyone up.

David puts his hands in his lap. Inhales. Puts them back on the keys.

Fathers and sons. David used to play on his family's small upright piano when he was a boy, after his father had dragged him and Ethan apart, dabbed the scratches on their fists with iodine, and banished Ethan to town to do errands for their mother. David, he would sit down at the piano, search through the sheets of music for something that David had learned months ago, and pat him on the shoulder.

"You don't have to put words to your feelings," his father said. "God knows I don't expect you boys to do much of that. But if you're going to shove ‘em out through your hands instead, then here's a way to do it."

In a small room in a huge palace, of which he is the master, David plays a chord.

* * *

Tonight Jack is sprawled on his back in the middle of the floor, giving a rambling description of the preoccupations of the People's Gathering—it's amazing what you can get away with spying upon if you wear a cap and dark glasses and sit up the back, apparently. David is tallying it against the reports that his Chancellor has been giving him of the same proceedings, listening for the gaps and discrepancies.

"I think Hanson's being fair," Jack says after a while. "He's not left out anything you really need to know. Part of his job's to filter this shit anyway."

"As long as he's not trash-talking me to the councillors," David says. He yawns, huge enough to set up an ache in his jaw hinges.

Jack pushes up onto his elbows and says, "If anyone's going to—oh, fuck off, now you've got me going." His yawn involves his whole body, from his scrunched up eyes to the length of his legs in their dark denim. His bare toes curl on the rug, and then uncurl.

Somewhere in the second sonata he played yesterday, a plan put out a slender green shoot from the soil of David's mind. He suspects that exposing it to Jack's judgement will be the equivalent of direct baking sun, but that can't be helped.

"You said Cox is still worried about lack of manpower, right?" David says. Laurence Cox, one of the most senior police chiefs in Shiloh, rounds out Weaver's cabal along with Dane Araluen and the Wolfsons.

"Yeah," says Jack.

David braces himself. "I've got an idea," he says.

He talks at Jack, and Jack talks back, for almost an hour. At the end of it, David's plan is still frail and new, but Jack's given it a frame to grow around, filled in a lot of David's holes, and pointed out a few that David had overlooked.

"You were right, by the way," David says, turning the shape of it in his head.

"I'm right a lot," Jack says. "About what?"

"I'm going to need a new Minister for Information. The last part won't work unless we've got total control over the news coverage."

"Actually, I've been thinking about that. I might have someone for you."

"Who?"

"I don't know if they'll do it," Jack warns. "Let me ask them first."

David nods. He flops down on his back and stares at the ceiling. Excitement fizzes in tiny bursts in his fingers and toes, though the rest of him's starting to tire. He almost doesn't let his next thought out; he's tempted to let it burn like paper in the flame of his pleasure at Jack's approval, but in the end he can't do it. He doesn't want to second-guess this later. And Jack, as ever, can be trusted not to pull punches. As mirrors go he's a merciless one.

"This is a kind of entrapment," David says. "That doesn't bother you?"

"Weaver would have moved against you anyway, eventually," Jack says. "It'd have been messier, without me to step into your shoes, but he's not a man to submit without a fight when half his power is knocked away. This is just...presenting a path for him to walk down."

"You can't know--"

"David, they're going to kill you."

David's startled into stillness at the stark deliberation in Jack's tone.

"You can depose a king without killing him."

"Not in Gilboa," Jack says. "My fucking uncle was right about that, and Silas was—" Jack swallows. "No. They want you dead, either during or after. Weaver doesn't like loose ends, and none of them is stupid enough not to see that you'd be a powder keg if they kept you alive. You're too much of a figurehead now to be stored away in a cell."

David closes his eyes for a few seconds, letting himself adjust to that, letting the fresh knowledge of danger settle in beside his doubt. He could do with an omen right now, but he doesn't have high hopes of one appearing.

"Stick with your strengths. Stop thinking diplomacy and think about it like war," Jack says. "It's you or it's the other guy."

"We're not at war with Nebo," David points out.

"And how long with that be true, if Abel Russe gains power?"

David nods, surrendering. He feels better for having argued it out. But Jack's probably right.

"Do you think Russe will go for it?" David asks. "My security council doesn't seem to think he needs that kind of help."

"He'd be stupid not to," Jack says. "If I can sell it."

If, if. A few months ago David wouldn't have dared to ask so much of anyone, but this is kingship: you open your mouth and you say what you want in a firm tone, and then it happens. Jack is bright-eyed and jittery with something that looks pride. David thinks that this is how it feels to hoist a grenade onto your shoulder, heart in your mouth and smoke stinging your eyes, aware of the thin-shelled explosion resting an inch from your head. Aware that all you have to do is press a button, and the next thing you know there's a story being told of one man taking down an army.

He could drown in all the things that Jack is asking of him and offering him.

"We still need a red herring to explain what I'm doing," Jack says. "And you're going to have to present it to Holland and the others on a really nice platter, so that _you_ don't end up declaring war on our southern neighbour just as we've stopped fighting the northern one."

"What about you? This isn't just resenting the guy who stole your throne," David warns. "This is a son of a king, betraying his country. This is active insurrection; _invasion_ , even. It's going to have to be a hell of a story."

Jack gazes at him, mouth slightly parted, as though in the inhalation before a long cold drink.

"I'll think of something," Jack says.

* * *

"I am so pregnant," Michelle says wearily. "Nobody has ever been this pregnant."

"I think you'll find that's not true, darling," says Rose Benjamin.

David has to think of her that way, one name after another, clunk-clunk, as though she were just another person in the long, long list of strangers he's had to cram into his brain; finding the rhythm of the words and hooking it, somehow, to the person's appearance. He has to think Rose Benjamin so that he doesn't think Queen Rose, or just: the queen. He hasn't gathered the nerve to wrap his brain around _mother-in-law_ , even inside his head. Even though he danced with her at his wedding.

Rose Benjamin, the Queen Mother. Everything about Rose is _brisk_ , like a toy overwound and held that way for hours and finally released to march in circles. David saw how ruthlessly she operated in the palace when it was Silas's domain. He was initially surprised that Rose could bear to be away from the centre of the action, away from the social and political circles she's presided over for so long, but now he's not surprised at all. It was both selfless and selfish of her, to stay away. Selfless because it threw the spotlight of authority onto her children, where it needed to be; selfish because she's not the type to sit by and fade gently into obscurity. He wonders how she fills her days. He doesn't doubt that she _does_ fill them.

He wasn't there to see her take aim and shoot her own brother through the skull, but the image doesn't stretch his imagination too far.

Rose hasn't thanked him outright, for the pardon, and David suspects she never will. But when she looks at him now, she looks him right in the face.

"I think I'm going to complain anyway," says Michelle. She shifts against one cushion and lifts her feet to lie on another, wriggling her toes with a frown. "About the size of my ankles, if nothing else."

"At least there's nobody taking photographs of them," her mother tells her calmly.

Michelle smiles. Rose smiles back. Motherhood seems to have collapsed something, some intangible barrier, that always existed between the Benjamin women. Michelle was always her father's daughter. Now David has seen her forging a new kind of relationship, mostly from a distance and over the phone, connecting with her mother: how to be a queen, how to be pregnant. It's a constant reminder that on the day of her father's death Michelle was abruptly catapulted into even more new roles than David was.

And now here they are, at Rose's country estate, awaiting the birth of the heir to the throne of Gilboa. Nobody could raise even the slightest eyebrow at Michelle wanting her mother to be by her side at a time like this, and security forces can stop the non-government press from getting past the boundaries of the property. Michelle's midwife and obstetrician have come with them from the city and are on call for monitoring and checkups, and there's a private hospital close by for the birth itself: a place so private that David had never heard of it, and now knows that its patients—clients—pay a lot of money to keep it that way. Mostly it's a place for quiet cosmetic procedures and detoxification from various substances, but it's got fully-stocked operating theatres and neonatal resuscitation machines. And it's _very_ strict about privacy, which is important given that Michelle is currently thirty-eight weeks pregnant and the country believes her to be four weeks less so.

Having fudged the timeline those few weeks, if the news does leak out early then they'll be able to sell it as a premature delivery, though not premature enough to be cause for serious concern. They might need to bump up the birth weight as well, Rose points out: "So that the size of him—or her—" with an exasperated glance at Michelle that Michelle will probably enjoy greatly "—explains the size of the bump, in retrospect."

"Pity we couldn't have faked twins," Michelle says with a sigh

"I think calling an entire fake royal baby into existence is beyond even the combined capabilities of the Ministry of Information and Lillian Syene," David says.

Michelle juts out her lower lip. Her eyes are shining. "Are you sure? They do run in the family, after all."

Rose looks from Michelle to David. After a moment, to David's surprise, another smile creases her face. She leans down and kisses Michelle's hairline, one slender hand at the side of Michelle's face.

"Believe me," Rose says dryly, "you should be counting yourself blessed that it wasn't twins. As much as I love you both, I'd have preferred to have you one at a time. You think nobody's ever been as pregnant as you? Try having _two_ of them sitting on your bladder and playing football with your kidneys."

"All right, all right." Michelle makes a face and shifts her position for the fifth time in as many minutes. "I take it back."

Lucinda comes into the room with two mugs of tea, looking small and relaxed; David realises that she is wearing flat slippers, and her hair is in a rough ponytail.

"I did find some peppermint," she says, handing one to Michelle, who has a go at balancing it carefully on her stomach before wincing at the heat and lifting it away again.

David's phone vibrates in his pocket, and he pulls it out. "I should—"

"Use the study down the hall, if you need privacy," Rose says.

"Actually, I might step outside, get some air," David says, and Rose nods at once towards the thick glass door leading to the paved courtyard. David lets the door close behind him and sits on the smooth step, already raising the phone to his ear. Not many people have this number, and David knows better than to miss a call from any of them.

"Hello?"

"Good evening, Your Majesty," says his new Minister for Information.

"Good evening," David says. "What can I do for you, Nancy?"

"Just checking in," says Nancy Pandanus, "to make sure that nothing unexpected has come up that I should know about. I've got three different press releases locked in my briefcase, and I'm going to be happy to burn then as soon as they become irrelevant."

David frowns. "Three?"

Nancy says, with the closest thing to delicacy David's experienced in their short acquaintance, "Good news can be kept hidden a lot longer than bad. Or did you think even Jack could pretend not to know, for four weeks, if something went wrong?"

David takes a deep breath of the air, which is so country-sweet that it makes his lungs burn with longing and nostalgia. A few dusk-dwelling birds are calling to one another in a dense shrub across the courtyard. David sees a flash of white beneath a tiny wing as one of them hops branches. _If something went wrong._ He remembers again the terrible strength of the angel; remembers, in an awful rush, a woman's corpse that his unit stumbled across when they were searching a bombed-out town. Her grey skin and unseeing eyes. Blood staining the dirt floor black.

"No," he says, swallowing hard. "No, that's a good thought. Thank you."

"And also, His Highness asked me to tell you," says Nancy, with an obvious shift in her tone, "that he's found the red herring you were looking for."

David rubs at his forehead and grins helplessly. "He didn't elaborate?"

"I think he's saving it up to show off later."

"He could have called me himself," David says, and there's something about the depth of Nancy's silence that makes him add: "Or…he couldn't?"

"No." The flatness of her voice leaves no room for argument. "You two won't be calling one another from now on. Phone records are easy to access, especially for someone with police resources. You're not speaking, remember? So _no speaking_."

"Got it," David says, ignoring the throb of disappointment low in his stomach.

"Except for your midnight rendezvous via secret tunnels," Nancy says, relenting, "which are ridiculous, if nobody has pointed this out to you yet. I'm sure the people expect more dignity from their leaders than something out of a spy novel."

"Amazingly, nobody has pointed that out to me, no," says David, struggling.

"Sir," Nancy tacks on, enormously belated, and David gives up and laughs into the back of his hand.

Sometimes David marvels that Jack, professionally paranoid Jack, is the one who ended up throwing his hands in the air and looping this near-stranger into the most dangerous secret of their existence, the one that was supposed to be kept between the two of them and nobody else. But there's only so many threads of intrigue you can hold, between two people, before you start running out of hands. David has the resources of the throne, but he can't deploy them all himself. This is not as simple as firing a grenade at a tank.

"Can I ask you something?" David says.

"Of course, sir." Her tone implies that she might not answer him, though. David has never met anyone less impressed with his status than Nancy Pandanus; she even pronounces _His Highness_ with a kind of fond sarcasm, like it's a private joke between Jack and herself.

"How did Jack get you on board?"

"You mean apart from offering me twice my salary?"

"Is that how little I'm paying my librarians?" David asks. "I can change that."

After a moment, she gives a short, dry chuckle. "Nice one."

"I'm serious."

"I know," Nancy says. "That's what makes it funny."

"Yes," David says. "I mean apart from that. He said you'd be hard to prise away from the books. So how did he persuade you?"

A pause. "He threw my words back at me," says Nancy.

"Yeah, he's good at that," David says. "What were the words?"

Nancy Pandanus says: " _Truth's only worth the good it can do_."

David shifts the phone to his other ear. A few stars are beginning to appear in the crisp purple sky. He'd almost forgotten how stars look when you're out of the city, away from the spill of muddying light.

He says, "We're not asking you to tell a lot of truth, here."

"History's what gets said when the dust settles," says Nancy. "And fiction's often more readable anyway. Let's find out the worth of a few well-placed lies."

* * *

Two weeks later, almost to the day, David returns to Shiloh, in his long black car with its long black windows. He aches the whole way, feeling like a piece of elastic tethered and then stretched out impossibly far. They enter the city an hour after sunset. When the car rolls to a stop inside the palace gates and David steps out, Thomasina is standing there in one of her dark coats with a paper bag in her hands.

David looks at the bag, then at her. Thomasina holds it out, the red Harry's logo prominently displayed, and David takes it.

"Thomasina," David says, with reverent exhaustion, "don't take this the wrong way, but sometimes I think you're a witch."

Her mouth plays with the idea of a smile, and she steps aside to let him lead the way indoors. "I'd advise against burning me, Your Majesty," she says.

"I couldn't do that," says David. "Then who'd bring me burgers?"

He eats the burger and fries straight out of the bag, standing up, alone in his bedroom. There's even a flimsy paper serviette for him to wipe his fingers on— _paper_. David's been wiping his fingers on heavy cotton for months.

The knock on the wall panel comes as David is pulling on a soft T-shirt in preparation for bed, still wearing the pants and socks of the daytime.

It feels—actually, David can't explain how it feels to have Jack come into his room and let the panel slide shut behind him and then stand there, gazing at David, looking for a few breathless moments very like his sister. There is a tidal strangeness to it that has never been there before. The sense that David has left one home and returned to another, like a pendulum swinging equally in each direction from the vertical.

There's a flash of hunger, a darkening, in Jack's eyes.

"A girl," David says without preamble. "We're calling her Simone."

A complicated expression, naked and soft, passes over Jack's face. Then it shrinks down to a focal point, which is Jack drawing his lower lip thoughtfully into his mouth.

"Michelle?"

"Doing just fine."

Another slow roll of lip between teeth. "How about that," Jack says. "Another state secret."

"For a few more weeks, yeah."

Jack walks over to him, his arms raising, signalling intent. David accepts the embrace gladly. Jack is warm and real and good, pressed against David's front. David lowers his face to Jack's shoulder and is shocked to find his eyes prickling with heat. Jack's fingers are firm, digging into the back of David's neck and curling around David's side, forbidding movement. There's something almost too intense about it, as though they are clinging for life at the top of a cliff, or before a battle. Which they are, David thinks. It's all downhill towards gunfire from here.

"Congratulations," Jack says.

David exhales, slow and grateful, and holds on.

* * *

If he's honest, David is sick to death of grand parties and state dinners. Thankfully, Michelle's absence from Shiloh is excuse enough to postpone whatever grand celebration is supposed to accompany the birth of royalty. The birth of Simone Rose Jessica Shepherd, Crown Princess of Gilboa, is celebrated—two weeks after the actual event, and officially two weeks earlier than expected—with a modest dinner in one of the palace's dining rooms. Friends of the family only. Which means that there are only fifty people, and not five hundred, wearing black tie and enjoying the output of the palace kitchens.

Among the guests are Neil and Ann Wolfson, parents of the queen's personal aide, and guests of the new princess's uncle. David has already had a five-minute conversation with Ann, a thin woman with Lucinda's dark hair and careful eyes. Jack's opinion is that neither of the Wolfsons _like_ Weaver much—considering him upstart new money to their old—and nor have they been roped in out of cronyism and greed, like Araluen and Cox. They're simply practical enough to attach themselves to the likeliest game that will win them what they want: their claws deep in the fabric of a Benjamin monarch's reign, and their daughter reinstalled at his side, cementing their influence.

They're loyalists, royalists, in their selfish way. David can't despise them entirely for that.

Ann Wolfson, sensibly, kept to a variation on the theme of what everyone here is saying: isn't it _sad_ that King David had to miss his daughter's birth, that his duties called him back to the city. Isn't it selfless of him to put the country first.

For his part David didn't let his mask of slightly bashful fatherhood slip an inch while he smiled into the face of one of the people plotting to have him killed. It's important that they're here. It's important to have witnesses.

Jack is seated on the opposite side of the long table to David, a few spaces down. He reaches often for the bottle of wine on the table, sometimes bumping into the glasses of other people as he does so. Drawing attention. David tries not to look at him more than at anyone else, and so can't keep a true eye on whether the level in Jack's glass is actually dropping, or if it's creeping upwards, topped up after each showy mouthful. It doesn't matter; Jack is never looking back, whenever David's gaze finds him.

Cake is served. Coffee. David takes a deep breath and gets to his feet, waiting for the room to fall quiet. He's not, he's never, in the mood for speeches. But he can use the way he feels now, raw and anxious and too far away from the newest love in his life. He has to use it.

"Thanks for coming," he says. "I hope you won't be too offended if I tell you I'd rather be somewhere else, right now." Smiles like dominoes, spreading from one face to another. "I feel like I should tell a story, but I haven't got any good ones. I only had brothers, and so did Michelle." He lets his eyes land properly on Jack. Now Jack is gazing back at him, very still. Coiled. "We'll be making this up as we go. But I'm glad I could share this day with you all. And so I'm going to ask for just one toast. To my daughter, Princess Simone."

A general clinking, as coffee cups are replaced and wine glasses are refilled and lifted. Simone's name is murmured like a talisman; like gossip.

Jack turns and says something to the woman seated next to him, who recoils with an expression somewhere between shocked and nervous. David narrows his eyes at the sight. He clears his throat so that nobody will miss what he's noticing.

"Do you have something to say, Your Highness?"

Jack smirks, obvious and irreverent. "Nothing fit for your ears."

"That's a pity," David says, level. "Sure you haven't got the urge to climb onto my table and smash my glassware?"

Let them all think he's petty; now they're thinking of the charity gala, drawing a line between that point and this one, and nobody will be able to help but see the downwards slope from one hostility to another. The deterioration.

" _Your_ table," Jack says. His lip curls. He stands, unsteadily. The scrape of his chair against the floor is like old steel being drawn from a scabbard. "You just can't help yourself, Shepherd, can you?"

David sees the reluctant standing to attention of the guards in the room and makes rapid eye contact with them, one by one, flapping his fingers in a controlled motion: stand down. But he lets his hand form a fist before he drops it to his side.

"That's enough," David snaps. "Enough, Jack. I won't put up with this any more. I put myself on the line to keep you out of prison, I swore on my own honour to vouch for yours. And all you do is lash out and refuse to cooperate."

"Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not being _gracious_ enough about being stuck here in your shadow?" Jack steps away from the table altogether, circling around to stand directly in front of David. Every eye in the room is glued to him. "Don't forget, I wanted to get out from under your feet. But you told me to stay and I stayed, like some kind of fucking _dog_. And I'm behaving myself like a good little nobody, aren't I? What more do you want, _Your Majesty_? You want me to get down on my knees and kiss the ground beneath your feet?"

David is frozen, knocked breathless by both the raw hatred in Jack's voice and the image of it, of Jack kneeling before him. The feeling that surges through David is awful and ruthless and energising, God's vengeful approval and God's breath in David's lungs: the power he has, the rightness of it, and what he could use it to do. Jack _should_ be on his knees. Right up close, so that David could get a hand in his hair and keep him there.

David swallows hard. He hopes some of his horror shows on his face.

"I'd settle," he says, letting that power sizzle out in his words like air through a puncture, "for a basic show of respect."

"Respect?" Jack laughs, horribly. He turns on the spot, whips around again with a finger pointed right at David like a gun and snarls, " _You're on my fucking throne_."

Ringing, absolute silence. Not a whisper, not a chime of metal on porcelain, from the people packed into this room. David can't bear to look anywhere but at Jack. He is very grateful that Michelle isn't here; bad enough that she'll hear about it secondhand, from every news and gossip outlet in the country. She has to hear about it. Everyone does. That is, after all, the point.

Jack is breathing hard. His eyes look like wild stars.

"You've got tonight to pack," David says. "I want you out of the country by midnight tomorrow."

Jack lets triumph flash briefly on his face—it's masterful, just long enough to be seen and imprinted—before it's overtaken by anger.

"With pleasure," Jack says.

* * *

When Jack knocks, this time, David almost doesn't want him to appear. There's a fight trying to stir in his knuckles in a way that hasn't happened since he left the war wholeheartedly behind, and he can't stop hearing the way Jack's voice had spasmed around the words he flung at David over the table tonight. But this is the last chance they'll get, this is the most important meeting of all. David makes sure he's standing, when Jack steps into the room.

Jack looks him up and down and David has a momentary shift of perspective, like the lurch of a truck over potholes, seeing himself anew: creased shirt, bare feet, as tired and unpolished as he's ever allowed to be these days. Then Jack peers more closely at David's face.

"Hey," he says. "You okay?"

David's breath explodes out of him. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah, I'm fine. That was just—that was intense."

A crooked smile jigs up Jack's mouth. "That was kind of the point."

"I know. I know."

Jack's holding something in a flat, square paper bag, which he sets down on the sideboard. His hands hover thoughtfully over the decanters.

"The brandy," David says. "Why not?"

"Why not," Jack echoes. The gentle sounds of frosted glass tapping clear glass, expensive liquid sloshing against itself, seem loud in the room.

"I hear the beer's good, in Nebo," David says. The joke falls weakly. "Do you know how you'll get to the border?"

"Yes," Jack says.

That seems to be all the information David's getting. He'd better get used to it, he tells himself; to not knowing where Jack is, and what he's doing. This is real in the eyes of every other person in the kingdom, and it has to be as real as David can make it: Prince Jack Benjamin has been exiled from the country on pain of imprisonment. Nancy has already put together the press release, which is something between a sorrowful disavowing and a Wanted poster.

Jack brings the glasses over and they sit, side by side with legs stretched out and a person's worth of space in between. David inhales the potent, almost woody scent of the apple brandy. The first time he tasted it he felt like an orchard had punched him in the mouth.

"Carmichael's not going to be happy with me," David says. "He did tell me you'd only stir up trouble if I let you out from under my thumb."

Jack picks up the nearest of David's hands and makes a show of inspecting it. It's a sillier kind of humour than Jack usually goes for. The mood between them tonight is a strange one. Jack's touch leaves behind smudges of wistful heat on David's skin, and he finishes by pressing the pad of his own thumb against David's, like a tiny secret handshake.

"Your thumb's not big enough for that," Jack says. "I plan to stir up all kinds of trouble."

"I'm counting on it," David says quietly, and knocks his glass against Jack's.

"I got you a present," Jack says. "Actually, two presents." He fetches the paper bag from the sideboard and pulls a cell phone from inside, with a scrap of paper attached to it with an elastic band. The paper has a phone number on it. "The number's for the phone I'm taking with me," Jack says. "Learn it, burn it. No calls, just texts. Encoded."

"That won't look strange?" David says doubtfully.

"They're going to expect me to communicate with _someone_ in Shiloh, and treason's a pretty good reason to keep your messages unreadable. They'll assume it's for my contact's safety, not mine. And I'll give Weaver the same number: two phones _will_ look strange."

"Encoded texts. How?"

"Present number two," says Jack, reaching into the bag again.

David takes from Jack's hands a slim hardback book, its dust jacket battered, the gilding on the page edges scratched and dulled. The picture on the front is of a puddle reflecting two pairs of legs, and the outlines of treetops, and an elaborate white arc of moon. The cover is unfamiliar, but the title isn't.

" _Take the Stars_ ," David says. "I haven't read this in years. We studied it in—seventh grade, maybe?"

"Every kid in Gilboa studied it in school," Jack says. "But I doubt they studied this version." He raps his fingertips against the cover. David opens it, gingerly, almost afraid to handle the paper. His eyebrows raise at the title page.

"First edition?"

"First ever. Only two hundred copies were printed," Jack says. He's looking at the wall, one hand looped around the other wrist. "My father bought me one of them for my birthday, when Michelle and I turned ten. I remember I was annoyed because it looked so old. He read it aloud to us that night, the whole thing."

David can imagine it: two dark-haired children, aristocrats of a nation stuck in a long, grinding war. Silas sitting on the edge of Jack's bed, adjusting his glasses—if he wore glasses, back then—and reading in his expressive, compelling voice.

"How much did this cost?" David asks.

Jack gives him an amused look. "That's what you want to object to? You do know how rich you are now, right?"

"No," David says bluntly. "It won't sink in."

"A lot. It cost a lot. Nancy bought it for me from an antiquarian in Port Hope."

David turns it in his hands. A book that almost nobody else owns.

"Now this is some seriously old-school spy stuff," David says.

The pleased light in Jack's face, when he sees that David has understood the purpose of the book, makes David feel greedy like a child getting their first gold star on an assignment. Jack nods.

"Ideally the key should be a one time pad, but if anyone goes through my things it'll stand out. A long running key cipher will do fine, and I can make the tabula recta from scratch on any paper at all."

David waves the book. "Are we agreeing on a page for the key?"

"Page number will vary by date sent," Jack corrects him. "Here, we'd better do it once. Paper?"

"In the desk," David says.

David used to play at codes and spies with his brothers and school friends, treating the classical cloak-and-dagger stuff as a game with no bearing on real life now that computers and passwords and technology existed. He knows the theory of a running key, but hasn't actually used one in a very long time. It takes a while to set up the tabula recta; David's hand is aching by the time he's written out his matrix of alphabets. Jack opens the book to page 15.

"Sixteenth," David says, looking at his watch. "It's past midnight."

"Pedant," Jack mutters, but flips the page at once. "If we wanted to really mess with the statistics, we should use nouns from another language," he adds. "Do you speak any?"

"No," David says. "Thomasina keeps threatening me with tutors, but I never seem to have the time."

"Never mind then." He bends his head back over the page, pen drifting, and finally hands David a fresh piece of paper with a broken string of capital letters.

David takes the book and sets to work in reverse, beginning with the first letter of the first line on the book's page, skimming down its column until he hits the first letter of Jack's message, and then following his finger sideways to the column that represents the letters of plaintext. It's quick, once he gets going. Of course, this process is far too involved to be useful in an emergency, but there are no good codes that can be translated at a glance. And in a true emergency it's unlikely to make much difference if the message is uncoded.

Letter by letter it takes shape.

IDON TACT UALL YLIK EBEE R

"I've seen you drink it," David says.

"You've also seen me half-naked with a woman in my bed," Jack shoots back. His mouth tightens, as though he didn't intend to say that.

"Then you'll just have to hurry back," David says. "I won't drink any more of this without you, how's that?"

"It's wasted on your farm boy palate anyway," Jack murmurs, but the tension's gone. "Good. One working cipher."

David takes as large a gulp of the brandy as he can handle and then sets the glass back on his bedside table. He's feeling out the edges of that strange mood. There's a part of him that was worn ragged by the fight tonight, no matter how staged it was, and is craving some kind of soothing. He misses Michelle in a quick, soft stab.

"Michelle," David says, while the thought is in his mind. "I'll have to tell her eventually. I can't let her go through the showdown, if nothing else, thinking the worst of you."

"You make the call," Jack says. "Whenever you think it should be done."

David blinks at him. Then smiles. "Are you taking off my training wheels, Jack?"

Jack shifts closer and places a hand on David's shoulder. "There comes a time in every man's life," he intones, gesturing with his brandy glass, "when he—shit." Jack looks at his lap and then lifts his hand to his mouth, sucking at a spilled patch of liquid. David laughs at him and Jack smiles back, his tongue darting wicked and thoughtful over his own skin, and his other hand is still there, David can feel the heat of it through his shirt, and David's insides are even hotter.

Jack's smile falters and he squeezes David's shoulder. "Despite appearances, farm boy, you were born for this," he says, rough. "You'll be fine without me."

"I'm not the one who's putting themselves at risk."

"Yeah, and thank God for that. I thought we already decided you'd be terrible at it."

"Jack," David says. A fist has grabbed at his heart. "Thank you."

He can feel Jack's thumb moving against the front of his shoulder, a small intimate back and forth. There isn't that much space between them now.

Jack looks down. Jack's hand drops from David's shoulder with a casual trailing-off of fingertips that makes David's whole arm tingle.

"Are you serious, Shepherd," Jack says then, "did you actually manage to _cut_ yourself on my expensive cipher key? See if I do anything nice for you ever again."

David also looks down at his hand, surprised. He hadn't been aware he was still holding the book, let alone gripping it that hard. The line of blood is very neat, lying there on the fleshy part beneath his smallest finger.

"It's not even that sharp," he says.

"King David the Goliath-slayer, taken down by a piece of paper," Jack says. "This can't make it into the news."

Jack's mouth is soft, though, around the sarcasm, and his eyes are sharp like the dust jacket wasn't. David stares at him, trying to think past the previous moment, past everything he wants. If Jack decided to destroy him now it would be as easy as pinching out a candle with wet fingers. Easy as winding up a dead watch. David inhales, remembering Reverend Samuels, in the garage, on the day his life was changed.

 _Oh_ , says that part of David that has long since moved aside and made a grotto in which God's voice can resound. But this isn't fire and brimstone and glory. This is something quieter, and more profound.

With his unhurt hand David smears the blood, one fingertip like a brush picking up paint, and reaches out to draw a line on Jack's forehead.

"In the sight of God, Jonathan, I make this covenant with you. I knit my soul to yours."

Jack flinches, barely. His wonderful eyes are shadowed now and his mouth has fallen open the smallest crack.

"What does that mean?"

"It means I've never trusted anyone as much as I'm trusting you now."

"You know what I've done," Jack says. "You know who I am. And you trust me?"

"With my whole heart."

Jack takes hold of David's hand again and holds his blood-specked fingers tightly enough that it hurts, David's bones shoving against one another. Perhaps they will snap and perhaps it would even be accidental. But Jack lifts the hand and bends, too, pressing his mouth to David's knuckles in a fierce motion that David can't pretend not to recognise. He's been on this throne long enough, been caught for long enough in the machine of his destiny and its iconography, to know fealty when he sees it.

"Jack," David says.

Jack hasn't once unlocked his gaze from David's. Jack moves before he can, and then Jack's mouth is against his: feverish and hard and desperately sweet. David lifts a startled hand and can't find anywhere to place it but Jack's cheek. David hears himself make a sound, and he opens his mouth to Jack's kiss, which seems in that moment to have all the inexorability of the first night they sat here—on David's bed, God, David has been _blind_ —and made of Jack's anger a slim knife to be tucked into David's sleeve.

It seems barely any time at all before Jack pulls away. He's breathing quickly and he looks like he's bracing for impact, his jaw clenched against a phantom blow.

"Yeah, that'll do me," Jack says. "You don't. I don't."

"I meant it," David says. "I trust you."

Jack laughs, a burst of sound like black water through a mouth that David can still taste when he licks his own lips.

"I know," Jack says.

And he's gone: across the room, through the wall. Gone.


	3. the arrow beyond thee

### JACK

Jack sits in the chair of the king, in the court room of Shiloh. Behind him the white butterfly insignia of the nation glows against the glass. He should be paying more attention; he is taking reports from a general, or at least someone in a dress uniform with a rainbow's worth of medals pinned to it. Jack is wearing a suit that is, he thinks, a little too tight. The gold leaves of the crown are digging into his scalp like nails.

He tries to lift an arm to adjust the crown, but he can't move. His shoulder cries out in agony when he tries to pull himself free of the chair.

"Help me," he snaps. "Can't you see I need help?"

The man in the army uniform steps forward, obedient. He has a knife in his hand. Jack feels a prickle of unease because there are no bonds holding him in place, as far as he can tell. Just his own skin, stuck. Anyone trying to cut him free is going to make him bleed in the process.

The man with the knife is David.

Jack takes a deep panicked breath and the knife slides into place, right between his ribs, a slicing hot pain.

David leans close so that his lips brush Jack's cheek.

He says, "Did you think I would save you?"

Jack wakes up in a cold sweat, staring at the underside of the empty bunk above. His ribs still remind him of their cracks with every heaving breath, his broken shoulder aches, and there's a prayer ringing in his mind so loudly it makes his lips smart: _my God, my God. Take my suffering and do with it—well, whatever the fuck you please._ He knows that this is his punishment for his part in his father's death, that God is vengeful, and that simply taking Jack's throne from him was never going to be enough. Blood calls for blood.

The tight, healing skin on Jack's feet is tender as a bruised plum when he sets the soles of them against the floor.

* * *

"Benjamin, come in."

Jack stands to as much attention as his shoulder allows, when he's inside the room. "General."

"Sit, don't be foolish." But there's a glint of approval on Abel Russe's face as he waves Jack towards a chair. Russe's been a soldier almost as long as Jack's been alive, and for all that their alliance is one of equals, this is a military base and Russe is the commanding officer. It puts them both at ease to lean on these roles, and it smooths down a part of Russe's ego that might otherwise get in the way.

Jack sits, not trying to hide the way his brow loosens as he takes the weight off his feet. Russe's eyes skim sharply down his body and then up again, as if working through the list that the company medic will no doubt have placed in front of his eyes. Or as if reliving each injury's infliction. He's seen the tape, after all.

"Are you getting everything you need?" Russe asks.

Jack nods, winces, says, "Yeah. Thanks."

An argument could be made that he needs stronger painkillers than he's taking, barely a week after Alpha team hauled him out of the room being used as a torture chamber. But Jack's been injured before, been in hospital before, and he doesn't like the thin layer of fog that drugs can lay over his thoughts. Better to be wincing whenever he moves than to be putting himself in a state where he might let something slip.

"I watched the tape again today," Russe says. "Not out of any particular enjoyment of your situation, you understand…"

"No, I get it," Jack says.

Russe nods. "I can see what you meant when you talked about ambivalence. Even in the teeth of the evidence, they didn't _want_ to believe that you could be a traitor of that kind."

Jack takes a deep breath and uses the ache of his ribs to wake himself up. Russe is smart, and a good judge of people; he has to be, to have reached the point where he is now. Jack needs to tread with absolute care.

"That's what will keep me on the throne," he says. "Once I've proved I've got the ability to take it."

"You leaned heavily on the Knights of Selah," says Russe. It's a question, kind of. Jack remembers muttering to Lydia Chalmers as she bent to untie him. Nothing goes unheard or unreported around here.

The Knights of Selah, with their single-minded and desperate belief that God wants them to reclaim their country, would throw their support behind a horse in a golden hat if it promised to grant them independence when the dust settled.

Jack thinks better of shrugging, but he makes an unconcerned face. "You saw what they said. I needed something to go on, some kind of scapegoat, and they already know I'm connected to the Knights. I'm sure you'd rather I confirm it, to be seen to be protecting that, than to give _your_ name…?"

Russe looks at him. Grey streaks his fair hair and his face has a settled look about it, each line like something folded from clay. "I do appreciate it," he says, dry. "By the way, while you were enjoying the hospitality of David's army, I had a talk to his Minister of Information."

A chill chases over Jack's spine. But this was going to happen sooner or later, and Nancy can handle herself.

He says, "She's a useful person to have on our side. I don't think we could pull this off without her."

Russe says, amused, "I can't believe she got past a vetting process."

"What vetting process? Gilboa isn't a democracy, General. The king's choice is final."

"Even so. How did David end up naming a radical Selahnese separatist as his Minister for Information?"

Jack has to swallow down an unexpected spike of anger that Russe would persist in calling him David, like he would a misbehaving child, when David himself has spent months scrupulously giving this man his title in public even as he denounces him.

Jack bares his teeth and tells the truth. "Because I told him to."

"Interesting." Russe's eyebrows go up. "I didn't think he'd be inclined to take your advice."

"It was an olive branch. Of sorts." Jack smiles. "I might have made some implications about my intention to behave better in public, if he did me this favour."

Russe gives an exhalation that comes close to laughter, but his gaze is unmoved. "I appreciate a man with an eye to the long game."

"I appreciate knowing that the southern neighbour of my kingdom will be led by someone who I feel…kinship with." Jack leans back in his chair, allowing some more arrogance to creep into his posture. There's only so much meekness that Russe will accept from someone with Jack's reputation. "And I'm relying on you feeling the same."

All of which—like everything that Jack has said to Russe so far in this conversation—is true. Premier Eliade is a sworn ally of King David. This plan hinges on Russe believing that he and Jack are similar types of men, raised in privilege and prepared to hold onto it by any means necessary. And both in need of an armed force to support them as they make a grab for power, one after another. A coup for a coup.

Jack can tell that Russe doesn't think of them as true equals, given Jack's age; that he thinks Jack might be malleable, and prone to look to a more experienced man for guidance. Erstwhile father figures crawl out of the fucking woodwork when they think there's something in it for them.

Russe says, "Can I ask, are you serious in your willingness to give away a third of the country, after so much blood went into uniting it?"

"That's the thing about a young country. It was put together recently enough that it'll be easier to fragment again."

Another prickling of fear takes momentary hold of Jack. Russe is half-expecting him to betray the Knights, to turn on them and break his promises when they've served their purpose. That kind of assumption betrays something about a man's approach to ambition. Thank God that Jack is far more use to Russe alive, and powerful, than dead or diminished.

Jack adds, "I'd rather be king of a smaller Gilboa then a nobody in David's empire."

"Not _nobody_ , surely."

"Close enough," Jack says harshly.

Russe nods, and leaves it there. "Another thing. Weaver's suggested that there may be problems in regards to Ephram Samuels. What's your call? Is he amenable to persuasion?"

Jack thinks about Samuels at Andrew Cross's trial. Samuels owes allegiance to no man, to no lineage, but only to the signs he sees and interprets. Jack wonders, and feels a tightness in his stomach at daring to wonder it, how difficult it would be to reach out and tweak the Reverend's experience of the world to point in a new direction, like a loaded die or a deck of cards stacked to win.

"He might be," Jack says, deliberately offhand. "But it doesn't matter. Either I'll get him on side, or I'll find God a new voice."

Russe nods again, as though this is an eminently rational statement. Thankfully he seems unable to see, or to even know to look for, the faint tingle of horror the very idea elicits in Jack. The religion of Gilboa is just one among many, here in Nebo, and a careful arm's length of space is kept between it and the political process. Most of the Neboleans that Jack has met treat the idea of a religious monarchy as something archaic and laughable, like the thought that same-sex relationships might be only just struggling into the realm of allowed behaviour.

Russe gestures for Jack to pull his chair closer to the table, and they go over the best route to Shiloh from the border; the locations of Gilboan military bases; the usual protocol that would be followed if an invasion is suspected or confirmed, and how they can utilise both local police—thanks to Laurence Cox—and the Ministry of Information, in order to work around it. Jack pores over the maps, concentrating hard, but feeling relief beneath it all. For all the need to be on guard, there's an openness to Russe's conversation that wasn't there before.

When the meeting's over, Jack walks through the rec area. The atmosphere changes when he enters; most of the faces in the room turn to him and linger before drifting back to television. The local news channel is showing footage with the UNN logo. Jack's sister is standing behind the press room podium, with the Reverend Samuels standing solemn and unflinching behind one of her shoulders.

The text along the bottom of the screen says, GILBOA: QUEEN TOUTS BILL TO RECOGNISE SAME-SEX MARRIAGE.

"This may not be the shining example people want me to put forth," Michelle says on screen, "but it's what I've got, and I want you to understand. Jack is my brother. My twin. And I am _ashamed_ that he had to hide for so long, that his own country made him feel so unwelcome and so alien."

"There's a thing," says someone in the room, conversational. "Actually trying to drag Gilboa into the modern day with the rest of us, huh?"

"If that's even the point of it," says someone else, glancing at Jack.

Jack's good hand is forming a startled fist, his nails digging into his skin. He relaxes it. He looks at Michelle, who will throw herself like a hurricane at the causes she chooses. She knows as well as anyone that social change can't be inflicted, but she'll have debated away every objection and accusation, forcing this through with all her wits.

"The law knocks down the wall," she says, on the screen. "The people may be slow to follow, but follow they will. I have faith in that. Because it's _right_."

The camera moves to David during the applause. David's face is relaxed where Michelle's is grim, his shoulders loose in the suit that doesn't make him look young, any more. He looks perfect. He claps with no hint of insincerity or impatience, and just before the camera cuts away it catches the beginnings of a real warm smile. Jack takes a tiny bite of the inside of his cheek. He told David to use his unpopularity for unpopular things; this was _not_ what he meant, and if David had suggested it he'd have argued him down. But he feels something like hot saltwater brimming around his heart.

He can feel the number of sly looks now being directed his way. He makes a point of trying to meet them instead of ignoring them.

"Not tempted to run on home, Your Highness?" someone calls.

Jack lets his face fall into the exact emotion he feels at that. "You're right—bit of a transparent ploy, isn't it?" he calls back. "After they've applied the stick so fucking thoroughly, I'm insulted they think I'd go for such an obvious carrot."

There's a bit of laughter at that. Attention begins to splinter, some people looking back at the screen, others returning to their games of billiards or cards.

Lucinda is standing behind Michelle's other shoulder. She's cut her hair; she looks older. _A great gift for loyalty_ , Jack thinks.

Michelle looks good too. Her hair shines, and she's wearing a red blouse with a black collar that isn't at all maternal. Jack knows, from weeks of watching news programs like this one, that the king and queen of Gilboa have expressed the wish for the Princess Simone to have a childhood as quiet and as normal as possible; to that end, the princess will be making her home in the country's east with the Queen Mother for the first few years of her life.

Jack, who knows his sister but also knows how to craft a story, knows how much it would have cost Michelle to sacrifice the dream of motherhood in favour of politics.

We give up what we want, when we want power.

"Benjamin." Chalmers has left the billiards table and comes to stand nearby, her hands shoved into the pockets of a leather jacket. Her close-cropped blonde hair draws the eye, defiantly, to the scar that tweaks the shape of her mouth. "You look a bit closer to human every day."

"Fuck you," Jack says comfortably. He flicks his gaze to the television for a moment, acknowledging it, and lets his mouth find that cynical expression again.

"I've got town leave tonight," she says. "And you look like a man prepared to buy me a drink."

Jack can't afford to pause for too long. Whatever this is, no matter the agenda, he'd better agree to it. And he really could use a drink.

"Sure," he says. "Let me go wash off the dust."

The muscles of Jack's neck are tense, let alone all the other places on his body which the medic has suggested would be the better for some heat. He spends a short time in the room assigned to him—just him, no bunkmate, in deference to the fact that he's technically both a senior officer and outside this militia's chain of command—then gathers his gear and goes to the showers, where the first minute's worth of hot water disposes of the tabula recta he used to encode the text he just sent to David.

Undressing is a chore requiring gritted teeth, and everything's more awkward with only the use of one hand. His broken humerus didn't need plastering once it was set, but he keeps his left hand pressed in a loose fist against his sternum, not allowing the arm to straighten and draw the bone's edges apart. He soaps and rinses laboriously, then tips his head back and lets water run in warm and overwhelming gushes over his face, grateful as he was grateful yesterday, as he'll be grateful for the rest of his life, that water didn't play a part in the repertoire of tricks that tall-and-ugly and Forks pulled out of their bag.

Jack tilts his head to the side and makes a slow circle of his good shoulder, feeling some knots begin to unlock with the heat. He can't be too long. Nebo's drought broke four years ago, but the habits of water preservation are hammered deep into its people.

He takes a slow breath, experimenting with where the pain begins, and then lets it out. Most of the initial swelling has gone down now, but Jack has bruises like someone's tossed tins of paint at his torso, yellow and purple and green, and not been too fussy about what ended up where. The dressings on his ankles came off yesterday and the bridge of his nose is still dark and sore, but the medics shoved his nasal bones back into place even before Alpha got him back to base, so there shouldn't be much lingering damage once it all settles.

It was worth it. No matter what, it was worth it. Russe's trust was harder to win than Jack expected; David sent several texts' worth of laboriously encoded protests when Jack first proposed this solution, but it's worked, hasn't it? Jack was captured by a small Gilboan unit sent to find out if he was stirring up trouble for the king, he was interrogated, and he didn't breathe a word about his ties to General Russe and his militia before he was retrieved. That's the story. Russe and his people absolutely believe that Jack's in opposition to David, now.

David, David. Glowing like the fucking sun, even through the miles and the media.

Jack gives up all pretence he isn't doing what he's doing; he's got to seize his enjoyment where he can, at the moment. He takes himself in one slick hand and closes his eyes. All he can smell is water and soap and the strange cold nothing-smell of the tiles, but if he concentrates he can almost drag the scent of David's skin, David's bedroom, into his mind. He can see the way David's mouth curves when he's thinking about laughter but taking a drink instead.

Jack moves his hand in fast strokes, not wasting time. His thoughts race, real images being replaced by false ones, falling easily into focus; Jack's got a whole damn library of them by now. David stretched out on the bed, like he has been so many times, but lying still on the pillows with his eyes gone to blue-green slits, his mouth bracketed by those deep and curving dimples, letting Jack unbutton his shirt and run his hands over the expanse of David's chest. David's own hand in Jack's hair, David's knee between his legs as Jack stretches out and leans down—

Jack leans back against the wall of the cubicle. There are bright stabs of pain as his breath quickens, and the hand held over his sternum is now a fist so tight it's close to cramping. The heat gathering, fast-fast-fast, it's been nearly two weeks since he did this, is a confusing mixture of raw desire and something both wilder and softer, like the urge to cry with a part of his body that isn't his face. David, David. This is a dangerous thing to be thinking, but everything about where Jack is right now is dangerous, and it's this or burst.

He circles his fingers around the head of his cock, tightens them right behind it, then goes back to a gentle jerky rhythm as he feels his orgasm curl up through his legs and shake them.

Standing in the warm water, scraping himself back together, Jack feels lightheaded. He looks at the scabs on his legs; he looks at his mural of a torso, or at least those parts of it that he can see. He pulls his breath back to normal.

"All right," he says, very quiet. "All right. Now get on with it."

He reaches out his good hand and shuts off the water.

* * *

The bar Chalmers takes him to is more like a pub, surprisingly large and built as a warren of booths and nooks. Jack appreciates it. He's not as recognisable here as he would be anywhere in Gilboa—context, again, goes a long way—but he's still got a famous face, and he's still on a stealth mission.

"Don't worry," Chalmers says. "You might be mistaken for a battered spouse or a member of an underground boxing ring, but not yourself. I wouldn't have suggested it otherwise."

Jack glances at her. "Good thing your knuckles aren't too scraped, _dear_. I wouldn't enjoy explaining to the General that you got yourself arrested on a domestic violence charge."

Chalmers snorts and nods to the bar. "Nobody here's gonna look that closely. Bad for business. Go on, grab a seat. First round's mine."

Jack tucks himself into a booth with a view of both the bar and two television screens. He doubts that Chalmers is fishing for anything more than a drink and some company, an extension of their flimsy camaraderie. Well, no: she might be fishing, she's one of Russe's best and most loyal people. But if this kind of social probing was going to happen, it probably would have happened before now, when Russe had most reason to be wary of Jack's offers and Jack's motives.

Lydia Chalmers is at least a decade older than Jack, and there's never been anything in her demeanour or her body language to suggest that she's interested in him, even without the news of his own preferences being splashed across the media of two nations. If Russe was going to try to get under Jack's defences in that way, Jack would be drinking with someone like Aaron Sagan from Charlie team, who has a smile like dark rum and a tendency to do shirtless chin-ups in the gym at all hours. But that strikes Jack as too obvious a ploy for Russe.

Maybe, he thinks, feeling the thought scrape over his wariness like sandpaper, Chalmers just likes him. Just gets on with him. Which is fine; Jack likes her too, and it's good that it's real, in a way. But making her like him, making all of them like him, just enough, is his job. He has to remember, always, what he's doing here. And what will happen to these people if everything plays out the way he intends.

The bar has a queue, and it's a while before Chalmers reappears with two half-pints of beer. She slides one across the booth to Jack, who takes his first sip absently, eyes still on the largest screen. Another channel, another news program, and again it's King David of Gilboa, this time meeting in Shiloh with trade delegates sent by Premier Eliade. David shakes hands, turns a pleasant face to the cameras, unbothered by the irregular flashes. Jack remembers David the first time he was shoved out in front of the press: the way he blinked and squinted, the tremble that you'd only see if you were looking for it, one soldier at another.

David is giving a speech of welcome. The closed captions race in jerky bursts across the base of the screen.

_...vision for Gilboa, for our place in this continent and this world. Today I carry on the work began…_

This is the kind of bar that should have sports on the screens, or perhaps old music videos. But a few months ago David told Jack the story of when he tried to leave Gilboa: the omens that God threw into his path, blocking his way. Seems like God's staying on message, even though Jack hardly needs a handful of coincidental news broadcasts to keep David's face at the front of his mind.

Chalmers clears her throat and Jack finally looks at her. She's a third of the way down her glass—so's Jack, though he barely noticed the taste of the beer going down this throat—and she looks halfway to amused.

"So kick me if this is out of line," she says.

Jack extends a pre-emptive middle finger, smiles, and says, "Go on."

Chalmers shrugs. "That is the thirstiest I've seen a man look while he is actually in the process of drinking, and I still can't work out if you want to fuck him or shoot him in the head."

Jack looks at his beer. Tread carefully.

"Or both," Chalmers adds.

Jack exhales a rueful laugh. "You know, the first time I saw him properly, I thought: at least he's fun to look at, this new puppet my dad's dragged home."

"He is that," Chalmers agrees. "Nobody'd kick him out of bed."

"And I wasn't even allowed to hate him, because he'd saved my life. And then he stayed," Jack says. "And he was...well, _that_ ," with a nod towards the TV, which is now showing a weather forecast.

"The gall," Chalmers says mildly. She's relaxed, leaning on one elbow, enjoying herself.

"So yeah, I want him. For a while I couldn't decide what I wanted more, him or the crown he snatched out of my hands."

"Made your mind up now, huh?" she says.

The smirk that curls over Jack's lips feels darker and more bitter than the contents of his glass. "There's only one of them I've got any chance of having."

Jack's story is solid, as far as the psychology of it goes. He resented his dead father; he's happy to tear apart the patchwork kingdom that was his father's legacy. The loss of the throne, the thing he expected and sacrificed everything for, has left him with a chunk taken out of him. He doesn't care what happens to the country as long as it's _his_ at the end.

Yeah, the story lines up. But it's better, it's messier and more human, with the extra morsel of truth. Which is...well, whatever Chalmers saw on his face when he was watching David.

"You want to hear something really fucked up?" he says abruptly. "I just jacked off in the head, before we left, thinking about him."

Chalmers lets out a delighted shout of laughter. "Fuck me. That is warped."

"God knows there's slim pickings around here," Jack shoots back.

"Just think about Sagan like the rest of us do," she says.

Jack grins at her; he even has a whole few moments of simple pleasure in the rhythm of her company, before falling back into caution streaked with guilt. He's had so many drinking sessions like this in his life. He's known so many soldiers like Chalmers, loyal to their commander above all else, and he can't dislike her for it.

She would have shot Jack without a pause if she thought he'd betrayed Russe. She still would.

War, not diplomacy, Jack reminds himself. Them or us.

He runs a finger around the rim of his glass, then drains it in a long series of gulps.

"It's a fucking itch," he says. "I can't get rid of it."

"No judgment," Chalmers says. "I've still got a few solid fantasies about my ex-husband, good-looking son of a bitch that he was."

Jack laughs and taps his empty glass against hers as he stands. "To revenge via jerking it," he says. "My round?"

And here's the thing, here's the truth that's deeper than the jokes and that renders all of God's omens redundant: Jack does want David, wants him with a helpless and everpresent sensation that's a hell of a lot stronger than an itch. He could dig his nails right into his flesh and not find relief. But mostly, he _misses_ David. He misses sneaking through the palace at night, trailing his fingers along the narrow walls of the secret passage and ending up in David's room, where he could be exactly himself. He misses watching David absorb the weight and the sharp edges of Jack's words and still trust him, still appreciate him and laugh with him and throw secrets back and forth until the balance of power between them was like a spill of coloured oil, all swirled together.

Standing in the bar queue, Jack rubs at the back of his neck. He turns, startled, when someone's shoulder bumps his good one.

"Fun as it would have been to watch you juggle two glasses with one hand…" Chalmers says.

"Right." Jack shakes his head. "Thanks."

They don't stay out long, and Jack's not stupid enough to let himself get drunk. He's still tired when they get back to the base, but he pulls his copy of _Take the Stars_ out of his bag, and encodes and sends one more text. Short and brutal. Nothing that needs a reply. But Jack has to shove these feelings out, has to feel like they're going somewhere, so that they can't embed themselves like splinters in the soft parts of his soul.

He sends: SOMETIMES YOU MAKE ME FURIOUS

He deletes the text from the outbox as soon as it's sent, tucks the phone under his pillow, and falls asleep almost at once.

* * *

The spire of the church against the deepening sky reminded Jack of home when he first saw it, and it drew him in like the pull of a tide. In Gilboa there would be a handful of these buildings in even the smallest village; it should be a surprise that this Nebolean town, of which Russe's base is on the outskirts, has one at all. Simply going by population statistics there shouldn't be enough people here, of this religion, to form a congregation.

But Jack isn't surprised. It feels inevitable, ordained, that the night before returning home a place like this should appear in his path.

Now Jack sits on the stone step, leaning against the heavy wooden door. The evening is halfway dark, and cool; his body remembers waking up like this, stiff and with a pounding head, and the sound of Nancy's voice. He's a long way from the Gilboan National Library and Nancy's coffee machine now.

He stares at the text message on the screen, entered by his own fingers and waiting to be sent. Not a lot of information. Some times, some places. Some advice.

He presses send and sits, listening to the sound of distant traffic and watching the outlines of bats weave jaggedly across the sky, while he waits for the confirmation from Weaver. There are some small stones scattered near his hand, carried up from the gravel of the empty parking lot on people's shoes. Jack flicks one of these stones and watches it bounce its way down the few steps, losing some speed from friction but shoved on by gravity. There's not much to be done once something's been set so decidedly in motion.

His phone gives a low buzz. He glances at it, then lets the screen darken. Nothing to be done at all, now.

He could go back to the base and close himself up with his book, piece together a final message to David, but there's nothing he needs to say urgently enough that it'd be worth the effort. All their own arrangements have already been made.

Besides, Jack's feeling rebellious tonight. In free-fall.

He climbs to his feet and turns to push open the door behind him, which swings open with a creak only just loud enough to be heard. Churches are never locked. Churches are always open to God's people seeing solace.

From the outside, this church's lights looked brisk and modern and dull, white bars attached to the exterior top edge of each window. The light has had to fight through softening and tinting glass, by the time it reaches Jack's eyes inside. The rows of pews are silent and orderly.

Jack removes his shoes and socks, and leaves them near the front entrance. His toes are immediately cool, bringing to his attention the age of the stone, which he feels oddly and piecemeal through the scar tissue that webs his soles. A lot of the furnishings are modern, albeit shabby, but this building has been here a long time. He walks down the central aisle to the prayer pool that dominates the chancel. The sound of his coins striking the coins already in the offering box is loud and musical, like wind chimes, but it doesn't summon anyone. The church _feels_ empty, the air sluggish and kind.

He lights a single votive candle from the taper on its stand. As he sets it carefully into the pool with one hand, he dials a number on his phone with the other. Two months after the break, his left arm is out of a sling and he's been given two pages' worth of exercises to do. It still shakes when he tries to support too much weight; he won't be doing push-ups for another month at least. He doesn't know who to thank for the fact that it wasn't his gun arm that David's interrogators decided to snap.

The phone rings and rings. Jack counts almost fifteen inorganic chirps against his ear before one cuts off abruptly.

"Hello?" David says. On guard.

Jack closes his eyes. Something inside him quietens. "Hey."

" _Jack_? What's happened?"

"I can't just want to hear your voice?"

A pause. "You're the one who said no calls."

"Find a church," Jack says. "Find a church, go inside, and call me back on this number." He gives his candle a nudge. It bobs like a drunken rowboat, but stays alight and afloat, drifting into the centre of the pool. The flame is steady and yellow. "Call it…a reckless act of faith."

The pause this time is longer, but there's no beep. The sound of David's breath is so soft and irregular that Jack might be imagining it.

"Give me twenty minutes," David says.

Jack stands at the pool's edge watching the candles until he can see nothing but constellations when he closes his eyes. Then he does a slow circuit of the nave. There are engraved war memorials hung on the church walls, bronze plaques in varying stages of burnishing, listing the names of the dead.

When his phone buzzes silently and demandingly in his hand, he's in one of the tiny axial chapels behind the altar. He sits on the ground instead of taking either of the folding chairs, stretching his legs out in front of him. Here, too, the floor is made of flagstones worn smooth with age. Jack never thought to miss the evidence of human history, when his family moved triumphantly into the rebuilt and reborn city. He was young and beautiful and so was Shiloh. It seemed that simple at the time.

"Do you ever get sick of how fucking shiny and new everything is in Shiloh?" Jack says, as soon as he picks up.

"Yes," David says at once. His voice is warm, with nothing to suggest that he finds this plunge into conversation strange. "Sometimes. Halfway through a budget meeting last week I was planning the speech announcing that the capital was moving back to Bethda."

Jack finds himself smiling.

"Look at you, Your Majesty," he says. "Growing into that authority."

"I was joking."

"You kind of weren't," Jack says.

David's laughter is rueful. "I kind of wasn't," he says. "This isn't good for anyone, Jack, this kind of power. Samuels gave a sermon the other day about the ancient prophets and the miracles they worked in God's name, and I—I thought, if I stood up now and asked for lighting to strike my enemies, I'm not sure it wouldn't happen. And that's _terrible._ "

"Easy for you to say," says Jack. He traces a join between stones with his finger. "What am I doing kicking around rural Nebo if you could have killed Weaver and the rest with a snap of your fingers?"

"Improving my diplomatic position, as you'll recall," David says. "And you can't make an electrified corpse confess to anything in a court of law."

"Careful," Jack says, with a dry mouth. "You sound like me."

"Yes, you're a terrible influence," David says.

Jack finds a truth in his mouth and almost chokes on the size of it. "I'm glad," he blurts. "I mean, finally, I think…I'm glad that I never had the chance to do what you're doing. I don't think I would have treated that much power well. I don't think it would have treated _me_ well."

It's the first time he's managed to think it, let alone say it. The idea that what happened to him, God snatching away his birthright and bestowing it on David, might not have been punishment at all, but a blessing. Albeit one wearing a heavy disguise.

"I don't know how it's treating me," David says quietly. "I won't. Only history will."

"You've been talking to—"

"Nancy, yeah, I have."

"David, if the worst you can come up with is a scheme forcing all your public servants to relocate to somewhere with more classical architecture," Jack says, "I think I'll hold off on actually declaiming and overthrowing you as a tyrant for a few more years."

This time the laughter is louder and truer. Jack doesn't laugh back, doesn't say anything, just listens and lets the sound of David's humour splash over him like summer until it dies away.

Neither of them says anything for a while. In particular, David doesn't say anything that Jack is half-afraid, half-hoping he'll say, something like _how's everything on your end_ , guiding this conversation back to the realms of business and the norm. There's nothing normal about this. This wasn't in the plan. This is a risk. But Jack can see the dim, rippling reflection of candlelit water against the white marble of the altar, and he's not afraid.

No. That's relative. He's still afraid to say some of the things he could say to David, even with the protection of distance. Some acts are more reckless than others.

"Hey, I wanted to ask," he says instead. "Do you know what happened to Fo—shit, I don't even know. The guy whose fingers ended up collateral damage."

Maybe he's pushing. He grips the phone and imagines David's wince; he forces himself to remember the man that neither of them are talking about: tall and ugly and guilty of nothing more than following orders, sacrificed for the game they're playing. _You're king,_ Jack told David, months ago; _you're going to kill people._

But no matter how hard Jack stares into his own self he can't find much guilt for what they did and what they're doing. It had to be done, he had to _sell_ what happened in that stinking room before and during and after the video camera. His shoulder will never move as easily as it did. The tops of Jack's feet, bare and pale, are like iceberg surfaces belying the fragmented crises beneath.

"You mean Sergeant—"

"No, don't tell me his name. Don't."

"He's doing well," David says. "Physiotherapy, a few home modifications."

Great, Jack doesn't say, he'll be back to spraying acid onto people's skin in no time.

He swallows hard and asks, "How is he sleeping?"

David says, "I think that's between him and his state-funded psychiatrist."

"At least he's got one," Jack says. "Counselling for vets, huh. Is that one of Michelle's?"

"It's a joint project," David says.

"I'm sorry," Jack says. "I wasn't sure how far they'd go."

 _"You're_ sorry," David says. "Jack."

"Did you watch the tape?"

There's a long pause.

"Of course I did," David says. His voice is low and horrible. "You were right. It was the least I could do. _Keeping my hands clean_ —"

"Yeah, that was a low fucking blow," Jack says, apologetic.

"No, you were right about that too."

Jack rubs the back of his hand over his mouth, aching. He wants to punch through the distance between here and Shiloh, step right through the fabric of creation, and take David's face in his hands.

"I threw up," David adds. "In a garbage can. Well, and also on Carmichael's shoes."

"How about that," Jack says. "I threw up too."

"Jack," David says, gentle. "How are you sleeping?"

Prickly heat fills Jack's eyes as though summoned by the snap of fingers. His toes curl reflexively on the floor. Without making a sound he lets the tears well up, wipes them clear with the side of his hand, and breathes. My God, my God. Not now. Grant me this.

"Don't ask me that tonight," Jack says, light. "I've always been shit at sleeping before a big day. My father found me in the kitchen at midnight, the day before I started school. He made me pancakes." He feels a jolt of surprise, somewhere in his chest, that he can tell such a story now.

David says, carefully, "You know the first time I saw Silas, up close, he was running from a helicopter. And he looked frantic. The first good look I got at his face, he was holding your hand pressed against it."

Jack doesn't remember much about his rescue from the Gathian camp. There was a lot of noise, and his head felt like it was going to explode like an egg dashed against the ground. He remembers nothing at all about the time between being loaded onto a truck and waking up in the field hospital.

"I think." Jack sighs and tries again, leaning into the distance and the cool coloured air of God's house. "I know...he loved me. As much as he could. But he couldn't forgive what I was. What I am."

"There's nothing to forgive."

It's like having fingers pressed down, too hard, in the hollow of Jack's throat. The ease with which David speaks. The memory of Silas snarling in Jack's face, _it's disgusting_ ; Joseph staring at him and asking, _was it real_? Black umbrellas in the rain. There are plenty, _plenty_ of things to forgive, and Jack deserves exactly none of it.

Jack says finally, "Look, I know Michelle's got her crusade going, and I know—"

"No. Fuck." David sounds angry now, and strained in a way that Jack can't identify. "Even before any of this I wouldn't have cared, Jack, if you'd—I mean, I know people, I've known people who—you could have told me. I know why you didn't. But I swear to you, I wouldn't have cared."

"I can't flip a switch," Jack says, harsh. "Any more than I can be—who I wanted to be. Who my father wanted to be. Half of me still knows it's something to be overcome, to be sacrificed, and God could still punish me for it—"

David says, still with that pure heedless anger of his: "God wouldn't dare."

All of Jack's breath leaves him like wind through a tunnel. He has to fight to inhale again.

"How can you just—say things like that?"

"God gave me to you. And now He gives you to me."

For a second Jack is sure that David can't mean it the way Jack thinks. In the next second he is equally sure that David, too, is thinking about what passed between them the night that Jack left Shiloh. This is the first time either of them has said anything to recognise what happened, that it might have been something more than goodbye.

Jack says, "Does He? I'm not the Benjamin you swore yourself to."

David laughs. "Yeah, Jack, you are. Or did you forget?"

David smearing blood on his forehead. The look on David's face, the dry salt of his knuckles under Jack's lips. Jack's chest hurts with each breath like he never healed at all, like a hot pin between his ribs. Trying to look at his feelings head-on is like wrestling with a snake, or an angel: something merciless and deadly and smooth.

Jack shifts his feet and tilts his head back. This place isn't huge, as houses of worship go, but it's still built on a scale meant to push humility down upon the heads of its people. The weight of all that air and space is like grief, like the exactness of a gun in Jack's hand. Jack is gazing at a ceiling swallowed in shadow, above the reach of the external lights, too far and too dark for him to make it out.

"I told you that you make me furious," he says.

"Yes," David says. There are still the embers of laughter beneath his calm tone.

Jack knows the lovely cant of the mouth that goes with that voice. He can see David's face so vividly that it seems, for a few seconds, much realer and more present than the distant interior of the church. He finds the fist of his free hand pressing against the bone between his eyes with bruising force. Right now nothing is more impossible or more necessary than making himself understood.

"Yeah, well, I mean it in the mythological sense. Like fire in my gut. God _is_ still punishing me, or at least God has a strong fucking sense of irony, don't you think? I've spent months talking venom about you, _good_ venom, so convincing, you should hear it. I think that you're wrong for Gilboa. I think you're a disgrace, I think you're trampling on my family's legacy. I hate you. I'm very good at hating you. And at the same time you keep showing up on the fucking television, _wreathed_ in grace, the truth of you staring me in the face, and I just, I can't help it, I feel—on fire. I'm on fire, David, do you know what that feels like?"

David is silent.

When he speaks his voice is raw, almost choked. "Ask something of me," David says. "Ask me for the throne. Jack, I would give you anything."

The stone church wall is cool against Jack's back. White halogen light comes through the windows above him and dresses itself in colours on the way: purple near his feet, a line of green over his knees, but the rest of him is red, like blood on his fingers, like he's being consumed by fire in truth. His hand is numbly tight around the phone. The words come pouring out of him without thought.

"In the sight of God, David, I make this covenant with you. I knit my soul to yours."

" _Jack_ —"

"I'll see you tomorrow," Jack says, and hangs up.

  


  


### DAVID

"— _on the road to the capital, I'm serious, and it looks like_ —"

"Sir," says Thomasina.

David switches off the radio. "What is it?"

"Word from the front gates. A Captain Becker. He said you'd have instructions for him immediately."

David's head turns so quickly he feels it jar his shoulder muscles. Part of him was expecting this, but not yet. How long does it take for a helicopter from the border to reach the outskirts of the city, and for an unmarked car to make its way from there to here?

"What time is it?" he says.

"Just past three, sir." Thomasina has the steely, displeased look she gets when she suspects David of hiding things from her. He doesn't like doing it, and he'd say that after today he never intends to do it again, but he's been cured of that kind of absolute statement. There's no such thing as a king without secrets.

"He can bring his men to the tapestry room," David says, standing and nodding at his security detail. "I'll see them now."

It's only when David is pacing back and forth inside the room in question that the symmetry grabs him, forces him to a halt, and then fills his lungs with the fluttering sweet sense of something inexorable falling into place. This is where they started. This is the room where Jack and Michelle were taken after Silas was killed, and where David was escorted to Jack, who had ordered him to be saved.

The door opens. They've put a cap on Jack, pulled down low over his forehead; Captain Becker doesn't pull it off until they're well inside the room and the door has closed behind them. All that Becker was told was that if Prince Jack Benjamin crossed the border from Nebo into Gilboa, he was to be arrested and escorted directly to the king's presence, under heaviest secrecy. No harm. No word. Nothing.

Jack darts a glance at David, then away.

"He gave himself up, sir," Becker says to David.

"I thought he might," says David. "Uncuff him."

A line smooths out on Jack's brow when Becker unlocks the cuffs behind his back, and he rubs immediately at his shoulder instead of his wrists. David swallows an unproductive urge to snap out at the soldier, who's done nothing wrong.

"Thank you, Captain. You can leave us alone."

"Sir—"

"I am presuming you've searched him for weapons," David says.

His dry tone seems to grab Becker by the neck. "Yes, sir," Becker says. He casts a final dubious look over his shoulder as he leaves the room, but he does leave it.

They're alone.

Jack looks around the windowless room. "Now here's irony for you."

David cracks out a laugh. "It wasn't deliberate, believe it or not."

David's heart is a racket and he feels unsteady. He almost can't look at Jack directly; he needs a piece of paper with a hole in it, like a child during an eclipse. Despite everything this is still startling, he still feels unprepared, all of his longing and fear welling up at once. The last time he saw Jack's face it was covered in blood and Jack was screaming, and it's like David has been wrenched back to that moment when he was watching Jack's interrogation, gripping the edge of his desk with nerveless fingers as the tape played out, feeling a vast urge to reach through the screen and pull Jack to safety, to bury his face in Jack's hair and tell him he was done, they were _done_.

There's a strange look on Jack's face. He takes a series of quick steps across the room; when he's close enough, he reaches out and touches David's cheek with a single finger, as if expecting marble but hoping for flesh.

Then he drops like his strings have been cut.

David fumbles to help him, in case this is damage from another injury, but Jack's stopped; it was a controlled motion after all. Jack has settled himself halfway to the ground, crouching. No. Kneeling.

David's hands are awkward on Jack's shoulders. He tightens his grip on the fabric and hauls Jack to his feet.

"My king," Jack says. His voice is rough and the expression on his face is like a chisel set against David's heart and struck, once and precisely, breaking it open along a rich seam.

And David, in the end, is the one to pull Jack close and kiss him. Jack makes an urgent noise against his mouth, a gasp gone rogue, and then gets a hand at the back of David's neck. No kiss in David's life has ever been this frantic or felt this unstoppable. Jack has sharp teeth and kisses like a warzone. David's entire body is lit up, shattered and remade, as though the pendulum of his heart has swung home and crashed through glass to get there.

Just as David's legs are going shaky, Jack breaks the kiss. He darts in for another one almost at once, as though testing a theory; this one is close-mouthed and light, and lasts barely any time at all.

David takes a deep breath and fails to say anything. All he can do is feel, and stare.

Jack reaches out to David's cheek again, using the same finger. This time he traces a curve that starts above the corner of David's mouth and travels almost down to his chin. David can feel the size of his own smile even without Jack sketching it for him, but the gentle intensity of the action makes him shudder anyway. He reaches his own hand up to take Jack's, but Jack pulls away and takes a firm step backwards.

"Jack," David says.

"Sir," says Jack at once, and then laughs like a small explosion. Jack's eyes are too bright, close to brimming. He swipes a hand over them and then, as though the action has wiped his entire self clean and ready for business, gives a sharp nod. "So," he says. "Looks like we pulled it off."

" _You_ pulled it off," David says.

A pleased kind of look hovers around Jack's mouth. "Yeah I did," he says. "And we haven't even ruined Weaver's day yet."

"I thought we could do that together," David says.

Jack grins, the sharp and promising grin that David's missed so much. David wants to press his own lips against that grin and let it cut him like paper; he could put up with a little blood, he thinks.

"Lead on," Jack says.

* * *

David enjoys the moment when he steps into the room, then stops dead in the doorway, more than he's enjoyed almost any moment of his kingship thus far.

The three men with their head bent over a tablet computer all glance up eagerly, as though they were expecting someone.

"I'm sorry," David says, with all the courtesy he has. "I didn't realise anyone was in here."

Graham Weaver recovers first. "Your Majesty, if you need the room—"

"I don't want to disturb you, gentlemen," David says.

Silence. Behind David, McKean clears his throat. David steps forward obligingly, so that his guard can take up a hands-clasped stance in the corner, and then closes the door. He doesn't close it all the way; there's a crack of air in the frame. He turns back to the small group, and frowns.

"Minister Wolfson, you look concerned."

Neil Wolfson shares a short, sharp glance with Dane Araluen. They're only just beginning to wonder, David thinks, why Jack would have sent texts directing them to meet him in a room where there was the remotest chance of David wandering in.

"Sir," says Araluen, uneasy, but Weaver cuts him off with a disgusted, "Oh, don't bother, Dane. What can he do about it now?"

"Mr Weaver?" David says, polite. "I'm afraid you've lost me. What can't I do anything about?"

"There's an army on the way to the city right now, and another one rising up from within your own people," Weaver says. "You'll see soon enough, King David. Everything will go easier if you step aside quietly, and spare your citizens another war."

"There's no army on the road to Shiloh," David says. "I think I would have heard about it by now."

"Not if your Minister for Information is in our pocket," Weaver says. Smugness rings brassily in his tone. "You can't see what's in front of your damn face. She's suppressing all the reports, she's—"

"See, Graham, I don't think you're listening," says Jack's voice, from behind David. There's only the slightest of creaks as the door opens, and none at all as it closes. "The king just told you, _there's no army on the road to Shiloh_."

David doesn't look, as Jack comes to stand beside him. He looks at the men in front of him instead. Weaver's eyes are darting from David, to Jack, to his fellows, and back to Jack. Looking for the angle. Looking for the clue that will make this fall into place.

"Faking official news reports of a full-scale invasion, now that would be quite a feat," Jack says thoughtfully. "I think Nancy and Lillian could do it. But still."

"It's a lot easier," David says, picking up the rhythm, "to fake a leak. All you'd need is access to a few local radio channels, and some half-decent actors."

"And some bloggers in the pay of the UNN, who are prepared to get a bit creative."

"Apparently," David says, "I've got _lots_ of those."

The silence that follows has a numb feel to it, as though they are all waiting for a dazed fighter to climb up from the mat. David lets himself glance at Jack, who looks twice as dangerous and twice as happy as David's ever seen him before.

"Oh, God," says Dane Araluen. He says it as he might comment on a minor piece of policy during a cabinet meeting. But he sits down, hard, and he's staring at Jack.

"Where's your wife, Minister Wolfson?" David asks pleasantly.

Neil Wolfson, too, is showing the first stirrings of real fear. He's not as smart as Weaver in some ways, but he's more than clever enough in this one. Weaver's ego is getting in the way, refusing to allow for the possibility of failure.

"I don't know," Wolfson says, stiff. "Are you going to tell me?"

"Lucinda's gone to tell her it's over," Jack says. He's watching Wolfson with a more personal kind of anger than David expected. "We've got people watching the house, if she tries to run."

Wolfson looks back at Jack. After a long moment, he nods, and then his entire posture slumps as though some vital piece of machinery has stopped within him, and he looks at the floor.

"No," Weaver growls. " _No_ —" but the sudden crescendo breaks off, almost awkwardly, when the door opens again and his son steps inside.

Just behind Tristan Weaver is Thomasina, and she gestures Raymond Carmichael into the room as well. David's chief of intelligence looks harried nearly to the point of anger.

"Tristan," David says, "I thought I told you—"

"I know, sir," Tristan says quickly. "Sorry, sir." He sidles along the wall and stands where he can see his father; he makes an apologetic face at David and then ducks his head.

"I've heard from the queen, sir," Thomasina says. "She says she managed to surprise Cox. He's in custody already."

"And I," says Carmichael, "just had a very interesting phone call from General Holland." He's looking at David as though he's never seen him before.

"I think I can guess what the chief of my armed forces had to say," David says. "Thomasina, when we're finished here, I'll need you to get me a direct line to the Premier of Nebo."

Thomasina nods. David watches her a moment longer, in case the bright embers in her eyes manage to escape onto her face, but she stays impassive.

David goes on, "I'm going to have to tell him that a militia formed from members of his own army, under the command of General Abel Russe, was stopped just over the border while mounting an illegal invasion of Gilboa. Luckily, I did have some idea that this might happen, and so my own army was able to move into position and intercept them. The Neboleans have been disarmed. Russe has been captured. Something like that?"

Carmichael presses his lips together. "Something like that, sir," he says, recovering.

Jack makes a tutting sound with his tongue. "Shit. That's embarrassing. I imagine Eliade will be forced to have Russe arrested."

"You know, I hear he might be grateful that he's finally got an excuse to do that," says David.

"Grateful's good," Jack says. "Embarrassed and grateful is even better. After all, Your Majesty, you do have the next round of trade talks to consider."

They hold a smile between them, like string between metal cans, and then David looks back at Weaver, who hasn't said another word. The extent of the situation has begun to sink in. Weaver's expression is crumbling at the sides like rotten cement.

"Graham Weaver," David says. He says it precisely. "Neil Wolfson. Dane Araluen. Conspiracy to depose the king is high treason. I do not intend, however, to have you executed."

Some of the greyness leaves Araluen's face. Weaver's shoulders tighten, like a trapped animal.

" _David_ ," Jack says. "I give up. You're fucking unteachable."

"Despite what my advisor thinks," David says, not even glancing in Jack's direction, "I'm still not convinced that's the best way to deal with my problems." He waits for the men to meet his gaze, one by one. "But you're never getting out of prison in your lifetime. And the law of Gilboa is clear on one point: if any person commits a crime that could be classed as a capital offence, regardless of any other punishment inflicted, their assets revert to the crown."

In the resulting pause, Weaver turns even paler. Something else cracks in his face, and it falls into a snarl.

"You wouldn't—you fucking little upstart—that company is _mine_ , I built it from _nothing_ —"

Before anyone can move, Jack takes three smart steps forward and hits Weaver, hard and fast, across the mouth.

"Watch your tone," he says, very cool. "You're talking to the king."

"Jack," David says.

"You haven't officially arrested the asshole yet," Jack says. He shakes his hand open. "That one was mostly for me, anyway."

"You tried to tear apart my kingdom," David says evenly, to Weaver, who looks more astonished than hurt. "And now I'm tearing apart yours." He adds, over his shoulder, "Tristan, I'm sorry, you're not going to inherit Weaver Green. There's not going to be anything left to inherit."

"That's all right, Your Majesty," says Tristan. His voice is uncertain, but it firms quickly. "I never thought I'd be much good as a CEO anyway."

"Of course not, you useless turncoat," Weaver snaps. His eyes move between his son and David. "You fucking little rat."

"The Weaver name lives and dies with mine," David says. "But not yours. Your name is dust, and it will be trampled like dust." He takes a deep breath, hearing a beat too late the echoing weight of his words. Perry's going to be annoyed he missed this. David's mouth feels like the roof of a church, like the place he sat in last night, holding the phone to his ear and drinking in Jack's voice like wine. "The money's going into the Treasury. I think we can find a few things to do with it, don't you, Tristan?"

"Yes, sir," Tristan says, with a bit of a smile.

More guards step through the door. It's getting crowded in this room, and the atmosphere has gone heavy with an odd mixture of fear and triumph. Jack's twitchy with it, David can tell. David needs to take him somewhere where he's not going to start hitting people again.

"Gentlemen?" David says, turning. He catches Captain Gerritz's eye. "I think you can take it from here."

Gerritz turns his gravel jaw onto the conspirators. "Sir," he says.

"Wait." It bursts out of Weaver. "You can't—it can't just be _over_ , it can't be _fake_. There are too many people involved. How many armies do you have? What about the Knights of Selah?"

David glances at Jack. Jack's eyebrows go up, then dive into a puzzled expression. He is totally composed, but David feels like if he touched Jack's arm he'd be buzzing like an electric knife, joyful and keen. It's infectious. David forces the laugh in his church-high mouth back down into his chest, where it waits.

Jack says, "The Knights of Selah? I don't know any members of the Knights of Selah, do you, David?"

"No," says David.

Weaver splutters, "But—"

"Of course," Jack goes on, "we _do_ know an ex-separatist who knows their workings so well that it would be fairly easy to fake some reports of domestic terrorism attributed to a defunct splinter group, as well as correspondence and pledged support from them."

"Especially if she's put in charge of the country's media," David agrees, turning back to the doorway.

Behind him, Raymond Carmichael says something very rude. The silent laugh comes up to glow in David's mouth. He keeps it there, hot behind his teeth, as he walks away with Jack at his shoulder.

* * *

"David," Jack says. "You know how we had that talk about not raising expectations right out of the gates?"

It takes David a moment, then he smiles. He drapes his jacket over the chair at his desk and makes a slow circle with his neck, stretching. Jack is rolling one of David's heavy fountain pens beneath his palm. It makes a hushed bumpy rattle over the inlaid leather surface.

"What, you wanted me to downplay your role, in front of the cameras?" David says.

"I can't live up to that bullshit you were spouting. Tireless efforts," Jack drawls. "Unspeakable courage. Unparalleled loyalty. You're not writing an epic poem."

"Perry is," says David.

Jack blinks.

"You said it," David adds. "We only get to use this trick once, and that was it. It doesn't matter now. And I want everyone to know what you did for me."

Jack's eyes drop for a long, obvious moment to David's mouth, and David's skin goes tight. The afternoon and evening have been a blur of cameras and decisions and speeches and emergency meetings, and David has apologised twice to Carmichael and once to Celia Halphen, and once to the rest of his security council, who seem torn between treating it as a piece of sound intelligence strategy and a bizarre, high-stakes prank. David has said the words _need for total secrecy_ until they lose all meaning, because he can't explain that the only place the plan made real sense, the only time he was sure down to his bones that it would work, was here. In this room, behind a closed door, with Jack saying _I'll think of something_ and David believing him.

They've spent this trick, it's true, but David's no longer silly enough to believe that they'll never have to do anything like it again. It's not enough to do one thing; it's not enough to take power without being willing to defend it, again and again.

The next trick will have to be different. That's all.

The door to David's room opens without a knock. It's Michelle and Lucinda. The queen of Gilboa is holding her shoes in one hand, and she tosses them to the floor as she dashes straight for her brother and throws her arms around him. David smiles and takes half a step sideways, to give her better access.

"Don't do that to me again," Michelle says fiercely. " _Don't_."

"Won't be able to," Jack says, slightly muffled. "David's trying to make me into some kind of saint."

"That's it? _Don't_?" David says. He leans back against the edge of his desk. "I got yelled at for half an hour."

Michelle pulled back. "I was surprised, when you told me. And that's putting it mildly. Now I'm just annoyed." She brushes back an invisible piece of Jack's hair and adopts an arch expression. "I hear you just spent months planning two violent coups so that neither of them would actually happen," she says.

"I know, talk about a waste of effort," Jack says. His voice is dry. "I'm sure you're going to shove all of _your_ achievements in my face now."

"I did get a few bills passed," Michelle says.

Jack gazes at her for a long moment, and then kisses her forehead. "You didn't have to do it," he mutters. "For me."

"Of course I did, Jack." She smiles back at him. "But no, it wasn't just for you."

"Michelle," Lucinda says, quiet from her stance near the door. "I can leave—"

"No, you stay." Michelle looks from Jack to David. "I trust her," she says. "With my life and with yours."

Lucinda's flawless cheeks turn a little pink. She keeps her chin high; her eyes are worried and keep drifting back to Jack. None of the strain of the day, of watching the parents who disowned her be arrested for a capital crime, is showing. David's coming to know her, even though she keeps a lot of herself hidden. He knows she probably doesn't miss much, and she remembers _everything_ ; she's a formidable thing to have in one's arsenal. She's as formidable as Jack, in her way.

"Then so do I," he says.

"Sure," says Jack. He nods, fractionally, in Lucinda's direction. David isn't sure what's passing between them. It looks like gratitude, but it could be more complicated.

"I meant it, though," Michelle says. "No more lying to me. Between us, the four of us, I want full disclosure. Total honesty. Always."

It's only because David's looking for it that he sees Jack's jaw shift, the ugliness quickly stifled with resignation. David knows what he's thinking: that this thing between the two of them, blood and wonder, flame and destiny, is once again something for Jack to hide. Corroding him in secret, no matter the lip service paid to openness.

David wraps his hand around Jack's hand and lifts it to his lips, kisses his knuckles. A prayer sighs in the silence of his mind.

"Jack," he says. "It's all right."

Michelle's head is erect and David thinks about her taking a sledgehammer to the law in order to make a place for Jack to exist, freely, exactly as he is.

Jack chokes out a laugh. The tendons of his fingers relax in David's grip.

"Full disclosure, sis," Jack says. "I think I'm in love with your husband. Hope you don't mind."

Michelle gives a long exhalation, as though at the end of a race. She looks at David and he looks back. David has the startling sense that they are finishing a conversation begun in silence a long time ago.

"I'll make whatever vows you need me to," David says. "I'm still yours."

"I had a dream a few nights ago," Michelle says. She looks between the two of them; her mouth is uncertain but her voice is firm. "I didn't understand it when I woke up. Now I think I do."

"Michelle—" Jack says.

"Full disclosure," Michelle says. "No, thanks for telling me. David?"

David gathers his nerve. He keeps hold of Jack and kisses his temple, rests his forehead there and breathes. Jack's own breath shudders out of him; David can feel him trembling with it.

"There are vows and there are vows," Michelle says, after a moment. "God does not punish love."

David holds out his free hand to her and she takes it, presses it, and smiles. David feels heat glow between their palms and he remembers the angel, the burning sigil of bargains struck, and the last of his doubts leave him.

"We did great things today, my queen," he says.

"And tomorrow we will do more," says Michelle. She smiles again, at Jack, drops David's hand, and goes to loop her arm through Lucinda's. "I'm sleeping in my room tonight, then."

Heat and an odd kind of anxiety crawl up David's spine as she and Lucinda leave, and gather abruptly in his stomach as the door closes.

"What was..." Jack swallows. He's looking at the door. "Just like that? Seriously?"

David says, "I thought _you_ were the one who had trouble sharing, when you were kids."

Jack's face breaks into an incredulous, not-very-amused smile. "I did," he says, uneven. "I'm improving. What did she mean, vows and vows?"

"She meant we live with what we've chosen," David says. "I'm king. I keep looking for the boundaries of what that means, Jack, and I can't find them—I keep thinking, something will be taken away, and instead I get given more, and—"

"What do you want?" Jack says, cutting across him.

David looks at him, aching and uncertain, unable to put any of it into words. He can't think of a way to say that he'd be happy to do nothing at all, just stand here with Jack in his sightlines, knowing that he's there, that they've _won_ ; that God has given them to one another, once and twice and thrice.

It doesn't seem to matter; Jack's moving. Jack is...lifting a pillow from the bed, and crossing the room back to David. He has the set shoulders and firm mouth of a man focusing on the ground in front of him in order to obscure the danger that lies further ahead: the sheer, stubborn, heedless nerve that wins wars.

For a brief and completely insane moment David wonders if Jack is going to hit him with the pillow. And then Jack tosses it onto the ground and drops to his knees; just as he did earlier today, but this time his eyes are dry, and full entirely of naked need. David has a flash of memory, like a slap, of his own coronation. One knee on a cushion, swearing himself into the service of Gilboa.

"Jack," he says, "you don't have to—"

"David," Jack says. "Want to know what I want? _I've_ wanted to do this for over a year." He has fast hands. David's pants are already undone and pulled partway down, David's cock tugged free of his briefs to sit in the air, not hard but already filling at the sheer proximity of Jack's mouth. "It's been driving me fucking crazy, thinking about it. Of course I don't _have_ to."

Jack leans in, not breaking eye contact, until his lips wrap around the very, very tip of David's cock. It's barely anything at all, but David feels it like an electric shock: the gentle warmth, the slightest flick of Jack's tongue into the slit.

David inhales on a gasp. Jack pulls back again.

"But unless you've got any more stupid objections…"

"Yes," David says, hoarse. "I mean, I mean no, I don't, I— _Jack_."

"Seriously, David, shut up," Jack says, and David does.

Jack's eyes flutter closed as he leans in again, rests David's cock on his tongue, teasing it between his plush lips. David lets out a low groan and lifts a hand to lay it at the back of Jack's head. It's strange for a moment, Jack's short hair, the slight silken grease of product there, but only for a moment. He moves his hand down until he's resting his palm in Jack's nape, rubbing with his thumb. He doesn't push, doesn't kid himself that he's the one in control here, just gives himself over to Jack.

Jack who presses slow kisses down David's shaft, looking almost worshipful as he turns his face into the soft crack of David's thigh and inhales, mouthing at the skin with pulses of wet tongue, before licking his way back to the head of David's cock and taking a few inches into his mouth.

David fights to breathe regularly through the sparks building and fizzing low in his abdomen. The hand not at Jack's neck is gripping the desk edge, and he has a moment of anxiety—lightheaded with pleasure, unable to tell his right from his left—that his fingertips are digging hard against Jack's skin instead of the polished wood.

"Jack," he says, hearing it come out plaintive and cracked. "Jack, that feels..."

Jack's reply is to open his eyes, a brief flick of them up to meet David's, pausing with his lips stretched wide. David has a moment of wanting to shove his fingers in beside his cock, two of them, hooking into the corner of Jack's obscene mouth and rubbing inside it. But he isn't sure what would happen if he tried any creative movements now. It's taking a lot of effort to keep himself upright, and to keep from pushing rudely forward with his hips.

As if reading his mind, Jack closes his eyes again and puts one hand on David's hip, steadying. He's using his other hand on David's cock, more to move it where he wants it than to get any real friction going. He gets David messy with spit, rubs his cheek against David's leg, presses David's cock up and nearly flat on his stomach so he can tongue at his sac, and then starts all over again.

David isn't one of those guys who's ever been able to come from a blow job alone, though to hear the soldiers in his old unit talk about it, he's in the minority there. But he'd have to be dead and fossilised not to find this breathtaking, _liquefying_ : the ceaseless movement of Jack's tongue and lips against his most sensitive parts, the shadows of Jack's cheeks as he sucks, the look of intent bliss on his face. Like this is an act of devotion. Like it really is something he's dreamed of doing.

David's nerves haven't pulled him close to the edge, but he's fully hard, his balls are throbbing with needy heat, and there's sweat forming on his stomach where it heaves with his breath. He feels itchy and weak in the legs. He looks down at Jack and his chest aches like an axe taken to a beehive, broken open, sweet and raw.

Finally Jack pulls his mouth away, dragging off slowly in a way that pulls a choked noise from David's throat, and then stands. One of his knees clicks in the quiet room as he straightens up. He kicks the pillow gently aside.

David's growing into his skin and his crown, but this is a whole new game, and Jack's always been able to throw off his balance. He feels as unsure and inexperienced as he was in his very first day in Shiloh, newly summoned by Silas: wide-eyed, nervous, unaware of the webs around him. He doesn't know what to do, doesn't even know what he wants to happen next.

Jack swallows, his throat moving convulsively, at whatever expression he finds on David's face. He steps closer, hands on either side of David's neck, and kisses him. It's gentle, slow, bare brushes of lips, even though part of David wants to shove deeper and find the taste of himself in Jack's mouth, the proof that he was there.

Their hips brush together and David hisses a curse into Jack's mouth. Suddenly he feels awkward, mostly dressed but with his cock jutting out between them, wet and yearning. Jack's hair is less neat than it was, but that's all.

"I think we should be wearing less," David says.

"As you command." Jack bites at the underside of David's jaw before David can decide whether that was mocking or sincere.

"Yes. I do," David says. He lifts a hand to bury in Jack's hair again, working on instinct, and is rewarded by the way Jack shudders and his eyes fly open, bright as stars, sharp with lust.

Jack is unbuttoning David's shirt, dropping kisses and sucking marks whenever he bares skin. He's using his teeth in a way that David will be able to see tomorrow, will be able to press his fingers to and feel. David's fingers are numb with desire as he reaches out to return the favour, each button a small triumph, until he can get his hands on the smooth curve of Jack's bared shoulders. Jack inhales sharply and his stomach jerks under David's fingers as David shoves the shirt to either side, then runs his fingers down the sparse line of hair.

Impatient, David removes his shoes and works his pants and briefs further down so that he can step out of them and kick them aside. Now when he leans back, the edge of the desk digs into the flesh of his ass. Jack reaches down between them and squeezes, hard and sudden enough that David jerks in his grip.

"I see," Jack says. "That's how you like it?"

David tips his head back and groans in answer. Jack presses another kiss, open-mouthed, to the exposed centre of his throat.

"Show me," Jack says.

"What?"

Jack steps back. All of David cries out with wanting him back again, close again. But there's something challenging and filthy to the tilt of Jack's lips, reddened and swollen as they are, something that David can't fight.

"Show me."

So David wraps his hand around himself and does. He keeps his strokes firm and erratic, not wanting to end this yet, but the pressure is such a relief after the incredible, tortuous, never-quite-enough of Jack's mouth.

Jack undresses himself, keeping his gaze trailing slowly up and down David as he does so, lingering on the motion of David's hand. Somehow he's even more beautiful out of his well-cut clothes, all pale limbs and dark hair, his cock flushed with need. David has to still his hand and look at the carpet to keep from coming right there.

They're both naked now, nothing between them. David's about to suggest a move to the bed, or at least _some_ kind of soft horizontal surface, when Jack crowds back into his space, confident, like it's nothing at all for him to wrap his arm around David's shoulders and use his hand to replace David's on David's cock.

"Oh, God, please," David says. He drops his head onto Jack's shoulder, his voice gone dark like secret places. "Yes."

"That's what you want," Jack says. "You want it _tight_?"

David kisses him again, unable to stop. Jack's mouth is sweet and full and easy, sucking gently on David's lip, and the rough scrape of their chins is unfamiliar and thrilling. Jack's body is a mass of skin under David's tentative hands. He can feel the firm nudge of Jack's cock against his, past the slide of Jack's fingers.

Jack gives his cock one more squeeze before letting go.

"Yeah," Jack says, rough. "I'm going to wring you out, David, this is going to be—you have no idea. You won't know who you are, when I'm done with you."

David believes him. His mouth is dry as a chill dawn in the desert.

"You got lube in here?" Jack goes on.

The syllables fail to cohere into meaning. Then they do. David nods and moves his eyes to the dresser, and Jack follows his glance. He presses another hard kiss to David's mouth and walks across the room. David watches him as though he's going to be asked to provide a description later, hovering between the oddness of having another man casually naked and hunting for David's store of condoms and lube, and the undeniable fact of his cock greedy for Jack's hand, for the sight of Jack's body, for _Jack_.

David shakes himself, heart pounding, and goes to sit on the bed. He takes the pillow with him, compelled by an out-of-place urge for neatness. Jack tosses a look at him, the hunger in his eyes flaring in glad counterpoint to David's own, and says, "Get comfortable. Pillows behind you, maybe."

As instructed, David half-sits, half-lies against his stacked pillows. He tries to slow his breathing and feels his muscles relax a little. All he has to do is whatever Jack wants. He can hardly go wrong there.

"I thought about you," David says. "About—well, this, I guess."

"Yeah?" Jack joins him on the bed and flicks a condom at David, who catches it. Jack coats his fingers with lube from the bottle and reaches behind himself. Some of the muscles that were halfway to loose go taut and wanting again as David realises that Jack is preparing himself.

David licks over his lips, then does it again. He flattens his hands against the sheets. "Jack."

"Keep talking," Jack says. A flicker passes over his face, a purely physical reaction, something between a grimace and a blink. "You thought about me."

David takes a breath. He can do this. It's only a secret; and with Jack, it barely even feels like that.

"As soon as you left the room, the night before you left, I wanted you back," he says. "You kissed me and I—I couldn't sleep, I just lay there thinking that this was just—it was just wanting, it was just like wanting anyone, and it'd always been women for me before but that didn't mean anything, because now it was _you_. I wondered what that made me."

Jack laughs shakily. His arm is still moving; as David watches, hungry for detail, he pulls his hand clear. His fingers glisten and he wipes them carelessly on David's sheets. "Less rare than you'd think," he says. "Is what this makes you. Are you gonna put that on, or am I doing it for you?"

It takes David two tries to open the condom wrapper. He rolls it on clumsily, not lingering over the action, and Jack moves, finally, again close enough to touch. He drags his fingertips up David's chest, brushing one nipple almost casually, as he kneels over David's lap.

David stares up at him, wondering if he looks as stunned as he feels, flayed open by how beautiful Jack is. This man whom God has chosen to be David's knife, his mirror, sewn into his very soul.

He touches the side of Jack's mouth and that mouth trembles. He can feel the grip of Jack's fingers through the rubber, Jack reaching back and lining David up with his slick entrance, and then sinking down enough to let him in.

Jack shudders with his whole body and his head flies back, his mouth open silently. The clench of him around the head of David's cock is so impossibly, insanely tight. David cries out, and scrabbles at Jack's hips, not sure if he wants to hold him still or yank him all the way down, but Jack is strong enough that it doesn't matter: he holds, balanced there on his knees.

"Oh, fuck," Jack mutters. "Just. Fuck." He bites down on his own lower lip, teeth turning the skin around it white. David half expects to see blood.

"Is this, is this all right?"

Jack winces and laughs and David can _feel_ it, the vibration around his cock, the way it loosens Jack up enough that he slips down another couple of inches.

"It's—been a while," Jack says. "That's all. And I know this is your first trip to the ballet, farm boy, so you can't be expected to know, but I kind of rushed through one of the steps, here." He's breathless. He's rocking his hips, though, making small circles, taking more of David in slowly and steadily. Between them his cock is pressing hard and hot against David's stomach.

David holds tight and forces himself to lie still, trying to breathe through more sensation than he's ever experienced at once, staring at his hands pressing into Jack's flesh, the jut of Jack's hipbone near his thumb, the way Jack's abdominal muscles shake beneath the skin of his stomach.

"Jack," he whispers. "You're amazing, you're perfect, this is —"

Jack takes hold of David's chin in one hand, thumbs his mouth open, leans over and kisses him. He gives little ragged breaths against David's mouth like he's drowning.

"There," Jack says, when he lets David come up for air.

And that's it, Jack's fully seated on David's thighs, the hot clench of him engulfing David all the way to the root.

"That tight enough for you?" Jack says. The cocky tilt is back on his lips.

"Perfect," David says again. It is. It's beyond anything. He has to screw his eyes shut for a moment and fight desperately not to come.

Jack rises a little on his knees, shifting, adjusting the placement of his legs on either side of David's hips. Then sinks again. David puts his hands at Jack's waist and this is familiar, or close to it, this part. Jack's eyes are almost all pupil as he says, "Fast or slow?"

"You choose," David says helplessly.

Jack sets a pace that's somewhere in between. He balances himself with his hands, at first, then grows bolder, skating his palms over the curve of David's shoulder like a stone tossed across ice, like David's skin is too hot or too cold to grasp all at once and he needs time to adjust. Every time he sinks down again, David feels like the air has been driven out of him, it's so tight and it never lets up and Jack's eyes are half-closed, David has to bend his own knees up before his thighs cramp. The angle shifts and Jack makes an incoherent sound as he pumps down again, a mouthful of consonants and wonder.

David moves his hands to squeeze Jack's ass, then traces with disbelieving fingers the slippery rim of Jack's hole where he's stretched around David's cock. That small thing is enough, is the final building block of pleasure, and David comes with the shaking force of artillery fire, his face buried in Jack's chest.

"Fuck," David gasps, with the first air that bothers to find his lungs.

" _Fuck_." It's a disbelieving echo, or maybe agreement. Jack shoves David against the pillows with a hand at each shoulder and then kisses him violently, with a sting of teeth. Jack leans back a little further, still impaled on David's full length, and gets a hand between them, around his own cock. David can't look away from the way Jack's mouth falls open and the way he looks as the orgasm rips out of him; the way he clenches even more tightly again around David's cock in a way that's almost painful, now.

David doesn't register the hot flick of fluid against his neck, the underside of his chin, until the thought bursts like a sudden bubble—that's come, that's _Jack's come,_ all over David—and he sees the look of frozen, black-eyed desire on Jack's face.

"God," Jack says, " _David_ ," and then Jack's palm is across David's eyes, tipping his head back, and that's Jack's tongue greedy and insistent on his jaw, cleaning him up.

David can't see anything, but he can taste sex and heat in the air. He feels like bread crumbling in warm water. He can hear the thunder of his own pulse, he can feel it knocking at his skin beneath Jack's lips as though in frantic welcome. David is blind and baring his throat and he has never felt more free.

He runs weak hands up Jack's back and squeezes gently at the bunched muscle around Jack's shoulder blades. Jack's mouth finds its leisurely way to his, and this is new, this kiss. Of course it is. So far Jack has kissed David in farewell, in greeting, in desperate fealty and in filthy desire, but the range of kisses that can be shared between two people is close to infinite. This one feels—not like coming home, though it might, in time. It feels like crossing a threshold, full of hope, and dropping one's bags on the floor.

"Hey, can you—" he murmurs, and Jack gets the idea instantly, climbing off David. They both wince a little. "I'm going to clean up."

"Go for it," Jack says.

David disposes of the condom, wipes himself down with a cloth in the bathroom, and switches off most of the lights as he comes back into the main room. It's earlier than he usually goes to sleep, but he doesn't think he'll have any problems dropping off. The night light in the nearest corner fills the room with more illumination than most people might want, but David's not felt comfortable waking to absolute dark since the night of the angel's visit.

Something strikes him as he wanders back to the bed.

"That's my side," he says.

"Fuckoff," Jack murmurs, sounding very content where he's splayed out over nearly half the bed.

David grins. "You do know you're talking to the king."

"Fuck off, _Your Majesty_."

"People have been punched in the mouth for less."

Jack's shoulders shake and he turns a smile on David, eyes opening sleepily, that makes David feel almost overwhelmed. He smiles and adjusts the covers, dragging the folded quilt from the bed's base up and over Jack's prone body. He lies down and gets comfortable, enjoying the heat that Jack generates, as his body sags around his glowing soul.

He wants to drift into sleep, but that hook he hangs his thoughts on is nagging at him, telling him that there's something he hasn't dealt with yet.

He opens his eyes.

"I'm in love with you, too."

Jack sort of laughs. He turns his face into the pillow. "Okay, you don't have to—"

"Jack," David says. He rests his palm on Jack's cheek and doesn't move it. Doesn't say, _but I want to._

Jack opens his eyes. David can't think of anything to say to convince him; he barely has the capacity to explain it to himself. So he just holds Jack's gaze, hoping that he still knows how to keep his hard-won poker face at bay. He wants it all to be there, on display, where Jack can see it.

Jack's amusement dies. Jack swallows, and looks frightened, and swallows again. Already the very skin of his throat is enough to make David ache with wanting. Jack's cheekbone is hot under his hand.

It is love that lights the world.

"Right," Jack says. "Got it."

* * *

Jack's hair is crisp and dark as the edges of a shadow puppet, set against the pale pillowcase. In morning light his eyes don't look rainy at all, but David can't decide what they remind him of instead. He's happy to gaze for as long as it takes. He'd forgotten how this felt, the tenderness of a new thing cradled in his heart like green shoots poking through dirt.

"Didn't you hear your wife yesterday?" Jack says, giving David's shoulder a half-hearted shove. "You've got things to do. Places to be."

"I don't have anywhere to be," David disagrees. "Not today, not for a while."

" _Today_ , as in _the day after the attempted coup_ , I'd think you have a hundred of them. They're going to come kicking your door down in a minute."

"I expect Thomasina is standing guard," David says.

Jack groans and brings his knees up, curling into a ball half-covered by the sheets. "I suppose I have a lecture about corrupting the king to look forward to."

"No, the lecture's about discretion," David says, amused. "And it's for me. Michelle's taken care of the rest of it."

One of Jack's feet untucks from the ball and rests on David's abdomen, too slowly to be a proper kick. David puts a hand on Jack's knee before drawing that hand down the hair-rough calf and to the ankle, pressing into the firm tendon. An irregularity in the skin prompts him to look down, and then he can't stop looking. His breath has stopped in his throat.

"It doesn't hurt," Jack says.

"Mm?"

"David. Don't."

David looks up at him. He doesn't move his hand from the cartography of scars that wrap around Jack's feet and ankles.

"Don't," Jack says again. "You're going to try to apologise, and I'm telling you, don't."

"What am I supposed to say?" David asks quietly.

"Nothing. I told you," Jack says. "You have no idea how far I'm willing to go for this. For you."

Jack who discarded his life's ambition in the space of an hour, placed the hilt of his bladed self in David's hand, and never looked back.

David releases Jack's foot and lies down again, looking helplessly into Jack's face. He leans in. The angle is a bit awkward but he kisses Jack's mouth open, kisses the scratch of his chin, kisses the hollow between his collar bones.

"And I told you I'd give you anything," David says, rough and true into the skin of Jack's throat.

Jack gives a laugh that vibrates David's lips. "You've given me plenty already," he says. He slings one leg over David's and rolls his hips, lazy, his bare cock pressing up against David's. "But I wouldn't complain if you wanted to try for some more."

Last night was amazing but it was, to be crude about it, David doing the fucking and being sucked off. He could easily tell that story in the mess with a little attention to pronouns. It's not like he, like Jack—and he feels hot and awkward at the thought, his heart speeding up and pounding, half fear and half excitement.

He thinks about the scars on Jack's ankles again. He thinks about standing in front of a tank, in the muddy dark. Put in perspective, this takes barely any courage at all.

"I want to suck you," he says, too fast and too blunt.

Jack bites his lip. His leg tenses and he pulls it back, getting some space between them. "David," he says.

"You'll have to show me what you like."

The lip rolls out again, slow, and David shivers all over. He's still nervous, but he wants everything, he wants to _do_ everything. He wants to do this.

Sitting against the pillows worked for him before, and it works now. David's nose is filled with the thick, half-familiar scent of Jack, and he wraps his hand around Jack's hardening cock for a few loose tugs while Jack positions himself. Jack could shove easily forward, from here, fucking himself into David's throat. He doesn't move, except to drag his fingers through David's hair and look down.

David clears his throat.

"Okay," David says. He's mostly talking to himself, but Jack echoes him, "Okay," with enough searing desire in his voice that David goes from trepidatious to flattered in two seconds flat, just like when his brothers dared him to climb the highest walnut tree. He gives a first tentative swirl of tongue around the soft, leaking head. It's not like he doesn't know how this works. And he remembers, with an intensity that makes him shudder, the slow and incredible workover that Jack's mouth gave him last night.

So he takes it just as slowly, letting himself get used to the taste. He holds the hot, fine skin on his tongue and uses the roof of his mouth. He goes where Jack's guiding hand wants him to go.

"That's it," Jack breathes. "I—fuck."

David pulls off to look up at him. Jack is staring at David as though David is the only light source in a dark universe.

"I'm good," David says. "Is this—?"

Jack doesn't answer in words; he rubs his cock over David's lips and David smiles, kisses it, feeling a bit silly. Then opens his mouth again. He fills his hands with Jack's ass and closes his eyes, just letting himself listen and taste and feel.

It's not long before Jack chokes out, "Okay, I'm going to—" but David stubbornly holds on, keeping Jack in his mouth. Jack hisses and David sucks, hard. "Fuck, you really—nothing's halfway with you, is it?"

Jack gives one more shove that makes David start to gag, and then there's a spill of salty liquid into David's mouth. It lasts a long time, Jack's muscles trembling and cock twitching with a series of little aftershocks, and David just swallows as best he can and then swipes a hand across the back of his mouth once Jack tugs his softening cock away.

"There's something new for the business card," Jack says, as though David's weird pride in what he's just done is obvious. "King David Shepherd of Gilboa, champion cocksucker. Who knew?"

David can feel his face burning. He grins through his embarrassment and shoves Jack away, hard, so he falls back onto the bed. Jack shifts around and flops onto his stomach, lying with his face turned towards David on the pillow. He looks pleased with himself.

Daylight shows one of Jack's arms to have a thin scar like a swipe of white paint. It's not the arm that was broken in Nebo. That scar is from the first bullet that was fired at Silas, David realises. Jack Benjamin and his habit of throwing himself in front of damage aimed at kings.

David runs his whole palm down Jack's spine in slow, easy strokes, exploring the breadth of skin on Jack's back, the sweet dip of his waist, the dimples at the base of his spine and the swell of muscle below them. _Not so rare_ , Jack said. David has been wrung clear of both shame and surprise. Bodies are bodies; Jack's is lovely, and the sensation of his skin under David's hand makes David feel covetous and powerful.

"Lube's on the table," Jack says, the end of it swallowed in a yawn.

David jerks his hand away, and then feels like an idiot. "Are you sure?"

Jack rolls his eyes. "No. _Yes_. If you need a fucking invitation—look, I love it when it's like this. Just after I've come."

"Yeah?"

The side of Jack's mouth curves up. He looks a bit embarrassed, but mostly defiant. "Yeah."

And this is another thing that's definitely not heterosexual, David reflects, when he's pressing kisses to Jack's bare shoulder and twisting two lube-messy fingers in Jack's ass—all right, so Jack maybe had a point about him refusing to do things halfway. Already he's thinking, half nerves and half excitement, about asking Jack to do this to him one day soon. He can feel Jack's heartbeat, like this, and it shouldn't be this overwhelming and this hot but _it is_.

When Jack's feeling looser, and starting to push back against him with insistent little jerks, David scrambles for one of the condoms. He makes even more of a mess of opening it, with his slick fingers, and ends up using his teeth.

"Some time before lunch, Shepherd."

"Okay," David says dumbly, "okay," and lines up and pushes down and in, one easy slide.

"Fuck," Jack breathes, stretching out the word, and the entire upper half of his body goes limp, sprawled on the pillow. "Yeah, you can—yeah. Just like that."

And David does, just like that, fucking down into Jack with a sensation of spots in his vision, going nearly dizzy with how good it feels. He feels restless, chasing something. He holds Jack's asscheeks together to make it tighter, then nudges Jack's legs further apart, then gets his weight onto his knees and leans forward, canting Jack's hips up to change the angle—

"Oh," Jack says, sounding absolutely gutted. He's clenching around David, rubbing himself against the sheets. "Don't stop. Stop and I'll kill you."

"Are you going to—" David starts, and Jack sort of huffs into the pillow and says, blurred: "No, too soon, but—that feels so good. _Fuck_ me," and everything goes soft behind David's eyes and he ends up holding himself up by locked elbows, both of them slick with sweat, his full body stretched over Jack's as his rhythm gets faster and more erratic. Their hands are linked, David's fingers tight in the gaps of Jack's, and he's pressing off-kilter kisses to the soft skin behind Jack's ear, the knob of his spine, a scar on his shoulder that David missed yesterday. Jack's panting, huge heaving breaths that David can feel everywhere. Jack turns his head and fumbles an arm up to drag David's mouth to his, moaning into it, messy like he can't concentrate.

"God, yes, split me open," Jack says, dangerous and drunken and lost. "Fill me up."

David gasps and comes like it's being ripped out of him. He buries his face in Jack's neck.

When he can think again, he realises that he's collapsed his full weight over Jack. His body rises and falls a very slight amount with each breath that Jack takes.

"Um," David says, feeling hazy and boneless. It takes most of his focus to roll heavily to the side, where he lies staring up at the ceiling. For a moment he feels like he could fall right back asleep, but that passes after a few breaths. A warm and fizzy energy is bubbling contentedly in his limbs.

He flaps a hand until it finds Jack's shoulder, and squeezes. Jack is looking back at him, when David turns his head. Jack is running his tongue over his bottom lip, which has an obscene and beestung pinkness to it, like he's been biting it hard.

"In case you were wondering," Jack says, in a voice with the edges scraped off it, "I'm not letting you get away after that."

"Was I going somewhere?"

Jack takes hold of David's hand, pulling it from his shoulder to his mouth. He drops a fastidious kiss on the tip of one finger, then draws that finger into his mouth, just to the first knuckle, teasing it with his tongue and a touch of teeth. David uses the finger to tug down Jack's swollen lip, on the way out.

"No," Jack says. "You're right where you're supposed to be."

* * *

"Be upstanding for the king," says Chancellor Hansen.

It's a fine day, when David walks into the court room with Jack a step behind him. The leaves far below are beginning to turn and David can see clear across the city.

The room hasn't been this full since David's coronation. Fabric shifts and people murmur, and the murmurs rise even higher at the sight of Jack. Apparently rumour has already expanded what happened yesterday far past the bounds of truth. Prince Jack took down an entire Nebolean infantry unit himself. King David offered Graham Weaver a choice between his life and his company. There were tanks on the road to Shiloh, and God reached out his hand and dissolved them.

David stands behind his seat, facing the court room and the row of his cabinet. He allows himself a very quick smile at Tristan. There are two empty chairs, and the eye is drawn to them like missing teeth.

And there's a chair that has been empty for months, which will now be filled. Jack stands to David's right, his hands resting on the seat of the king's advisor. In the quiet the crowd prods its neighbour, turns its head, exchanges looks. It's like watching a muted television. David stands there for a while longer, letting his eyes skim over the room, until everything settles again.

He pulls out his chair, and is aware of Jack doing the same beside him.

Nobody is speaking, but Perry is writing something anyway, and for a moment the furious scratch of his pen is the only noise in the room despite the press of people. Sunlight spills through the glass and spreads benediction over David's skin. At the edge of his hearing is a sound like the beating of fine and ancient wings, like a breath held for a thousand years and finally released into the stream of time.

Lit from behind, Jack is radiant. He meets David's eyes and nods.

They take their seats, as one.

"Let's begin," David says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fahye.tumblr.com


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